He stretched his hand out to her, but Frida hesitated to take it. She became alternately red and pale, some stormy, hardly repressed feeling seemed bursting from her control. Suddenly Jessie's voice was heard from the terrace. Growing anxious at the long absence of the young visitor she called her name. Frida sprang up.
"Miss Clifford calls me, I must go to her. Thank you, Mr. Sandow, I will not be afraid of you again?"
And hastily, before he could prevent her, she pressed her lips to the offered hand, and fled away through the shrubbery.
With great astonishment Sandow looked after her. A singular girl! What did it mean, this strange mixture of shyness and confidence, of blazing passion and such power of self-repression? It was a riddle to him, but just with this unexpected, contradictory character, Frida succeeded in what the cleverest calculations could not have done--in awaking a deep and abiding interest in the heart of a man generally so cold and indifferent.
He had indeed every reason to be irritated and annoyed "with the fanciful girl, with her exaggerated ideas," but through his irritation another feeling forced its way, the same which he experienced when he first looked into these dark childish eyes, and of which he could scarcely say whether it caused him pain or pleasure.
He forgot, perhaps, for the first time in his life, that his study, and his writing table laden with important letters awaited him. Slowly he sank on to the bench and gazed at the restless rolling sea.
"A deadly monotony" he had said, of this eternal motion. The taste for the beauties of nature had long ago died out in him, like so many other tastes, but the words of the just concluded conversation still rang in his ears. Truly; on the other side of this heaving ocean lay his native land, his home. Sandow had not thought of it for years. What was home to him? He had been long estranged from it, he clung with all the roots of his present life to the land he could thank for what he was. The past lay as far distant from him as the unseen coast of home, yonder in the mist.
The proud rich merchant, whose name was known in every quarter of the globe, who was accustomed to reckon with hundreds of thousands, certainly looked back with contemptuous pity on the past, on the narrow life of a subordinate official in a provincial German town. How close and confined was then the horizon of his life, how wearily must he then struggle to make both ends of his paltry salary meet, till at last, after long hoping and waiting, he reached a position which allowed him to establish his modest household. And yet how that poor narrow life had been beautified and ennobled by the sunshine of love and happiness which was shed around it.
A young and beautiful wife, a blooming child, the present full of sunshine, the future full of joyful hopes and dreams, he needed nothing more, his whole life was overflowing with happiness, but what a fearful end to all that joy!
An old friend of Sandow's, who had grown up with him, who had shared his boyish amusements, and later had accompanied him to the university, returned, after a long absence, to his native town. He was well-off and independent, and his life was dimmed by no cares for the morrow, unlike his friend; who, however, received him with open arms and led him to his home. And then began one of those domestic tragedies which are often concealed for years, till at last some catastrophe brings them to light.