"With a sister, you know, it makes no matter. I am in the exclusive possession of all Benno's tender secrets, and lately Kurt has honored me with his confidence. He is smitten with the twelve-year-old daughter of the geheimrath who has recently moved into the rooms below, and vows that Raphael never painted such a head. Why should I not be your confidante also, especially since you are my eldest brother--or are you not?"
I was surprised to hear Paula, who usually weighed every word, chattering after this fashion. A great change must have taken place in her since we had parted. It was no longer the Paula who in the shade of the high prison walls had developed under my eyes from a child to a maiden, and whom I thought I knew as I knew myself. What had loosened her tongue in this way? And whence had she the free carriage which I so much admired in her, as she now sat in a graceful posture in the low chair, while a beam of sunlight touched her head which seemed surrounded with an aureola?
"But you don't answer me," she resumed; "and really you have no cause to be ashamed of what you have done. Hermine says that without you the boat would have been lost, and probably the ship also. You may judge how proud I was when I heard it. And what do you think was my first thought?--that my father could have heard it too."
Paula's large eyes filled with tears, but she quickly suppressed her emotion and said:
"Yes, I was proud of you, and happy in the thought that you should commence life with such a noble deed, a deed worthy of yourself. And now you must tell me what you have been doing all this time, and you must expect to pay the penalty if I am not entirely satisfied with you. Sit here in this chair. We have a quarter of an hour yet before my mother and the boys come back. An idea about the picture there had come into my mind, but it is better so."
I gave the dear girl an exact account of all that had happened to me since my discharge. She listened with the closest attention, and only once smiled when I took pains to prove that I should have entered the machine-works in any event, and that the fact that the commerzienrath was my employer was far from agreeable to me.
"But neither the commerzienrath nor Hermine know anything about it."
"No," I answered; "and that is one comfort."
"Which will not last long, for they will soon learn it."
"From whom will they learn it?"