"Not yet," said Bertalda, "but he is not far off it."
The girl's usually laughing rosy face was pale and changed; she was breathless from the haste she had made, and could hardly bring out her words, as with trembling knees she sank into the nearest chair.
"He is ill! where? in your house? for God's sake, Bertalda, speak!"
Ferdinanda stood before the girl, pressing her hands in hers, and putting back the ruffled hair from her brow.
"Speak! speak!"
"There is not much to say," said Bertalda, raising herself up, "only you must come with me at once, or he will shoot himself. He wanted to do it before, and now his own father sends him a pistol to do it with! There is an officer--Schönau is his name--with him now; but those sort of people talk such nonsense--America! I dare say! He will never leave my room if you do not come to him and tell him that you would remain with him if he had forged his father's name for a hundred thousand instead of this miserable twenty thousand. Why, my goodness! an Englishman once offered me forty thousand, but I didn't like him, so there was an end of it; but these men are all like children with their foolish ideas of honour. I only tell you that you may not be startled by anything, because you, too, are so absurd about such things, and if you only look-- There! you are just like the others; you are heartless, the whole lot of you."
Bertalda said all this behind Ferdinanda's back, as the latter after her first words was moving wildly about the studio, looking for her things, and now stood still with her hand pressed to her forehead.
"If only I were you," said Bertalda, "I would go with him to the devil if he would take me. He is not wise, he would get more from me than from you. Why did I sit with him and comfort him all night long, when I was dead tired and might have been sleeping in my comfortable bed--or on the sofa even, or the carpet?--it would be all the same to me, if only the poor boy were at ease. And this morning again! I should like to see the woman who would go through it for her husband! That would be a fine fuss! and I, like a good-humoured fool, agree to everything, and persuade him instead of shooting himself to go to Sundin, and farther on--I don't know the name of the place--and shoot Count Golm, merely to change the current of his thoughts, for he does not care one bit about his so-called betrothed--and then I rush headlong here, and--well, what do you want?"
Ferdinanda had hardly heard or understood a word of Bertalda's rambling speech. She had been pulling out and ransacking drawers from the desk which stood in a corner of her studio near the window, and now sitting down opened her blotting-book.
"What are you about?" repeated Bertalda.