"Yes, I'm going, Irma, you can count on me, I won't forget," she answered almost humbly. "Don't worry, we'll arrange it," and then her eyes fell on the little figure of the woman bending over waiting to have the two buckets, one filled with apples and the other with pears, put into her hands.
"I'll just take it with me—to show Fanny," she continued.
Irma's eyes filled with tears as she took the little carving from the table and started to wrap it in a piece of newspaper.
"No, give it to me just as it is. I'll carry it in my bag," and she put it into her worn reticule that never stayed clasped and now promptly fell open as she laid it on the divan.
"You won't lose it," questioned Irma anxiously, seeing her put it into the precarious keeping of the bag, but her sister-in-law didn't answer, only pulled the curtains together again. Irma went slowly back to her embroidery, but after a moment or two not hearing any sounds of moving about, she asked in a tone whose irritation was but half-suppressed:
"Don't you think you had better begin to get ready?" This having to push her sister-in-law up and along, out of the house, filled her with a sickening impatience.
"Yes, perhaps I had better," Frau Stacher answered obediently, "though it isn't far."
And then Irma hearing those soft, slow movements of dressing behind the curtain said no more. She was really only thinking of the moment of her sister-in-law's return, with the money in her purse or perhaps enough to be prudently pinned into her dress.
Frau Stacher was thinking of nothing. All the forces of her being were employed in that act of clothing her body. After she was dressed she noticed that she had on the wrong skirt, but she felt she couldn't change—and then she had put the velvet around her neck. One thing she didn't do that morning, she only remembered it when she got out into the street—she hadn't pulled back the curtains.
But Irma, as she saw her ready to depart, though she noticed that the curtains weren't drawn, only said again: