He went home with her, and in the evening they all went to church together.
He cried unto the Lord for strength and help, and almost lost consciousness of the service in his earnest prayer for true manhood and courage to go forward to what he feared would be a sad and lonely life. And the answer came; for a sense of power and readiness to do God's will, and withal a strange hopefulness, inspired him. Trusting in the Divine strength, he felt that he could meet his future now, whatever it might be.
Again the alarm-bells were ringing, and there was a light on the southwest.
"There seems to be a fire over there in the direction of my poor German friend's house. You remember Mrs. Bruder. I will go and call on them, I think. At any rate I should call, for it is owing to her husband that I won the prize;" and they parted at the church-door.
Christine had left the picture-gallery soon after Dennis's abrupt departure. Her gay friends had tried in vain to rally her, and rather wondered at her manner, but said, "She is so full of moods of late, you can never know what to expect."
Her father, with a few indifferent words, left her for his place of business. His hope still was to prevent her meeting Dennis, and to keep up the estrangement that existed.
Christine went home and spent the long hours in bitter revery, which at last she summed up by saying, "I have stamped out his love by my folly, and now his words, 'I despise you,' express the whole wretched truth." Then clenching her little hands she added, with livid lips and a look of scorn: "Since I can never help him (and therefore no one) win earthly greatness, I will never be the humble recipient of it from another. Since his second picture cannot be true of my experience, neither shall the first."
And she was one to keep such a resolve. The evening was spent, as we know, in singing alone in her studio, this being her favorite, indeed her only way, of giving expression to her feelings. Very late she sought her bed to find but little sleep.
The day of rest brought no rest to her, suggested no hope, no sacred privilege of seeking Divine help to bear up under life's burdens. To her it was a relic of superstition, at which she chafed as interfering with the usual routine of affairs. She awoke with a headache, and a long miserable day she found it. Sabbath night she determined to have sleep, and therefore took an opiate and retired early.
Mr. Ludolph sat in his library trying to construct some plan by which
Christine could be sent to Germany at once.