"Certainly," agreed the baroness.
Anna looked from one to the other. "Well?" she said, as they did not go on. Then the thought of her peace-making errand came into her mind, and her certainty that she only needed to talk quietly to these two in order to convince. "What do you think I came in to say to you?" she said, with a low laugh in which there was no mirth. "I was going to propose that you should both begin now to love Emilie. You have made her cry so often—I have seen her coming out of this room so often with red eyes—that I was sure you must be tired of that now, and would like to begin to live happily with her, loving her for all that is so good in her, and not minding the rest."
"My dear Anna," said Frau von Treumann testily, "it is out of the question that ladies of birth and breeding should tolerate her."
"Certainly it is," emphatically agreed the baroness.
"And why? Isn't she a woman like ourselves? Wasn't she poor and miserable too? And won't she go to heaven by and by, just as we, I hope, shall?"
They thought this profane.
"We shall all, I trust, meet in heaven," said Frau von Treumann gently. Then she went on, clearing her throat, "But meanwhile we think it our duty to ask you if you know what her father was."
"He was a man of letters," said Anna, remembering the very words of Fräulein Kuhräuber's reply to her inquiries.
"Exactly. But of what letters?"
"She tried to give us that same answer," said the baroness.