"You are going to keep the baroness?"
"If she cares to stay, yes."
"I thought you would. It is for you to decide who you will have in your house. But what would you do if this—this Lolli came down to see her sister?"
"I really cannot tell."
"Well, be sure of one thing," burst out Frau von Treumann enthusiastically, "I will not forsake you, dear Anna. Your position now is exceedingly delicate, and I will not forsake you."
So she was not going. Anna got up with a faint sigh. "It is frightfully hot here," she said; "I think I will go to Else."
"Ah—and I wanted to tell you about my poor Karlchen—and you avoid me—you do not want to hear. If I am in the house, the house is too hot. If I come into the garden, the garden is too hot. You no longer like being with me."
Anna did not contradict her. She was wondering painfully what she ought to do. Ought she meekly to allow Frau von Treumann to stay on at Kleinwalde, to the exclusion, perhaps, of someone really deserving? Or ought she to brace herself to the terrible task of asking her to go? She thought, "I will ask Axel"—and then remembered that there was no Axel to ask. He never came near her. He had dropped out of her life as completely as though he had left Lohm. Since that unhappy day, she had neither seen him nor heard of him. Many times did she say to herself, "I will ask Axel," and always the remembrance that she could not came with a shock of loneliness; and then she would drop into the train of thought that ended with "if I had a mother," and her eyes growing wistful.
"Perhaps it is the hot weather," she said suddenly, an evening or two later, after a long silence, to the princess. They had been speaking of servants before that.
"You think it is the hot weather that makes Johanna break the cups?"