“Yes. They say it will be a great ceremony. One ought not to miss it.”
“Had she been ill long?”
“Oh, very long. Our old doctor had already given her up years ago. Then she was in the south with her daughter, and after her return lingered on for I don’t know how long.”
He listened; a dim presentiment arose in his mind. The fir branches. The fir branches.
And one of the voices continued:
“Tell me; the daughter must be quite at a marriageable age now. Is she not engaged yet?’
“She is celebrated for the refusals she deals out,” answered the other voice. “Some say she did so in order not to leave her sick mother; others because she has a secret love-affair with her cousin, Leo Heller; you know him.”
“Oh, the young good-for-nothing!” said the first voice again. “Last week he lost eight hundred marks at baccarat; the money-lenders have got him well into their clutches, and he keeps a mistress, too. But he is a smart, gay fellow for all that, and quite made to catch goldfish.”
And the two voices went away laughing.
Paul had a vague feeling as if he must throw himself down on the ground and press his face in the dust; something rose in his throat; everything began to swim before his eyes. So she had ceased to suffer: the pale, kind woman who had watched over the Haidehof like a good angel, and whom his heart had clung to all his life.