"Oh, poor child," said Lilienfeld. His manner was abstracted. Evidently his mind was on the speech he might be compelled to deliver before the Mayor of New York. "Excuse me," he said suddenly to Frederick, and moved a few steps away to make a hasty, nervous perusal of his notes, which he had written on a slip of paper and had taken from his pocket.
"My mother was dead, too, but came back to life again."
"How's that? How's that?" asked Lilienfeld, raising his gold spectacles slightly from his nose and peering at her from under them.
Frederick explained how they had had to work over Mrs. Liebling for several hours before they succeeded in resuscitating her.
"If in this world honours were awarded according to merit," Frederick added, "then that simple servant-girl there"—he pointed to Rosa—"ought to receive greater honour as a hero of two worlds than Lafayette. She performed miracles. She never thought of herself, but only of her mistress, Mrs. Liebling, of the two children, and the rest of us."
Frederick went to Rosa and shook hands with her. When he inquired for Mrs. Liebling, she turned red as a peony.
"Mrs. Liebling is very well," she said, and promptly burst into tears, having been reminded of little Siegfried. When she dried her eyes, she told Frederick that she and a German consul, without Mrs. Liebling, had attended to all the formalities of the burial and that she had been the only one to see the little corpse laid away in the Jewish cemetery.
"Oh, why did you stop trying to revive Siegfried so soon? I begged and begged you to go on. There was still life in him. He would have come to," she wailed.
Here a stranger joined them. It was not until he was quite close that Frederick recognised in the correctly clad man the valet of Arthur Stoss.
"Doctor von Kammacher," said Bulke, "Rosa cannot get it out of her mind. Can't you make her understand that it isn't right always to be going over and over such a thing and that she ought to forget it? It couldn't be worse if she had lost a boy of her own. I want to tell you, Doctor von Kammacher, Rosa and I are engaged to be married."