Chapter II.
Her name was Antonie. She was the inn-keeper Wiesner's only daughter and managed the household and kitchen because her mother had died in the previous year.
His name was Robert Messerschmidt. He was a physician's son and a student of medicine. He hoped to fight his way into full fraternity membership by the beginning of the next semester. This last detail was, at present, the most important of his life and had been confided to her at the very beginning of their acquaintanceship.
Youth is in a hurry. At four o'clock their hands were intertwined. At five o'clock their lips found each other. From six on the bandages were changed more rarely. Instead they exchanged vows of eternal fidelity. At eight a solemn betrothal took place. And when, at ten o'clock, swaying slightly and mellow of mood, the physicians reappeared in order to put the patient to bed properly, their wedding-day had been definitely set for the fifth anniversary of that day. Next morning the procession went on to celebrate in some other picturesque locality the festival of the breakfast of "the morning after."
Toni had run up on the hill which ascended, behind her father's house, toward the high plateau of the river-bank. With dry but burning eyes she looked after the wagons which gradually vanished in the silvery sand of the road and one of which carried away into the distance her life's whole happiness.
To be sure, she had fallen in love with everyone whom she had met. This habit dated from her twelfth, nay, from her tenth year. But this time it was different, oh, so different. This time it was like an axe-blow from which one doesn't arise. Or like the fell disease—consumption—which had dragged her mother to the grave.
She herself was more like her father, thick-set and sturdy.
She had also inherited his calculating and planning nature. With tough tenacity he could sacrifice years of earning and saving and planning to acquire farms and meadows and orchards. Thus the girl could meditate and plan her fate which, until yesterday, had been fluid as water but which to-day lay definitely anchored in the soul of a stranger lad.
Her education had been narrow. She knew the little that an old governess and a comfortable pastor could teach. But she read whatever she could get hold of—from the tattered "pony" to Homer which a boy friend had loaned her, to the most horrible penny-dreadfuls which were her father's delight in his rare hours of leisure.
And she assimilated what she read and adapted it to her own fate. Thus her imagination was familiar with happiness, with delusion, with crime….