But Frau von Treumann felt that by no amount of thinking it over would they ever get rid of the Penheim.
"You do not like my Karlchen?" she said plaintively to Anna that evening, coming out into the dusky garden where she stood looking at the stars. Karlchen was well on his way to Berlin by that time.
"I am sure I should like him very much if I knew him," replied Anna, putting all the heartiness she could muster into her voice.
Frau von Treumann shook her head sadly. "But now? I see you do not like him now. You hardly spoke to him. He was hurt. A mother"—"Oh," thought Anna, "I am tired of mothers,"—"a mother always knows."
Her handkerchief came out. She had put one hand through Anna's arm, and with the other began to wipe her eyes. Anna watched her in silence.
"What? What? Tears? Do I see tears? Are we then missing our son so much?" exclaimed a cheery voice behind them. And there was the princess again.
"Serpent," thought Frau von Treumann; but what is the use of thinking serpent? She had to submit to being consoled all the same, while Anna walked away.
CHAPTER XXI
Anna seemed always to be walking away during the days that separated Karlchen's first visit from his second. Frau von Treumann noticed it with some uneasiness, and hoped that it was only her fancy. The girl had shown herself possessed of such an abnormally large and warm heart at first, had been so eager in her offers of affection, so enthusiastic, so sympathetic, so—well, absurd; was it possible that there was no warmth and no affection left over from those vast stores for such a good-looking, agreeable man as Karlchen? But she set such thoughts aside as ridiculous. Her son's simple doctrine from his fourteenth year on had been that all girls like all men. It had often been laid down by him in their talks together, and her own experience of girls had sufficiently proved its soundness. "The Penheim must have poisoned her mind against him," she decided at last, unable otherwise to explain the apathy with which Anna received any news of Karlchen. Was there ever such sheer spite? For what could it matter to a woman with no son of her own, who married Anna? Somebody would marry her, for certain, and the Penheim would lose her place; then why should it not be Karlchen?