"Of course it is, but I always have to put myself in mind, before I can realize that I am actually a child of this hateful North, where I am such a total stranger. I was hardly eight years old, when my father died, and two years later I lost my mother also. Then I was carried first to relations in Austria, and later to Lausanne, where I went to boarding-school. When I grew up, Oscar took me away, and since then we have lived mostly in the South. At Rome and Naples, the Riviera and Florence, in Switzerland, too, we have been a few times, and once in France. But Germany we have never come near!"
"Poor Cecilia! so you have never had a home!" cried Maia, compassionately.
Cecilia looked at her in great astonishment; such a life of vanity as she had led, continually changing both her society and surroundings seemed to her the only enviable one.
Home! That was quite a novel idea to her. Her eyes took a hasty survey of the parlor where they sat--yes, indeed, it wore an entirely different air from the gay and yet commonplace hotel-apartments, in which she had been living for years.
Those rich dark tapestries and curtains, that oaken furniture, every piece of which had an artistic value--the family portraits on the walls, and above all the breath of comfort that pervaded the whole! But, on the other hand, all this appeared so somber and dark, in the light of this gray, rainy day--as grave as all the people here, with the solitary exception of Maia--and the spoilt child of the world inwardly shuddered at the thought of her bridegroom's "home."
"Do you really and truly spend the largest part of the year here at Odensburg?" asked she. "It must be very monotonous. You have such a handsome residence in Berlin, as Eric has told me, and you hardly spend two months in the winter there. I do not understand it."
"My father think he has no time to move around the world," said Maia, in a wholly unembarrassed manner--"and I have only been a few times to the Baths with my aunt and governess. I like it here at Odensburg."
"Maia has not been introduced into society yet," explained Eric. "She is to come out next winter, for the first time, for she has completed her seventeenth year. Until now little sister has always had to stay up in the nursery, even when we had a large reception at home; and as to city life, she knows nothing of it whatever."
"I went into society when I was sixteen," remarked Cecilia. "Poor Maia, to think of their keeping you waiting so long--it is incomprehensible?"
The young girl laughed merrily at being the object of such genuine commiseration.