When the dinner-bell sounded from the other side of the park, the door opened again, and the little troop came out and trotted towards the village.
Then all was quiet again around the lonely house, only an anæmic servant girl moved now and then backwards and forwards between the cellar stairs and the front door. Not till after the vesper hour did footsteps, light yet energetic, sound from the direction of the park, breaking through the undergrowth to cut off the curves of the pathway.
It was Hertha, come to pay her daily visit to her stepmother. The relations between mother and daughter had never been very intimate. The gloom that had overshadowed Johanna's temperament, her sybilline air, the atmosphere of incense and carbolic with which she was surrounded, all combined to repel the child with her craving for light and joy, and to make a close affection between her and her stepmother impossible. Yet, in her innermost heart, she cherished a sentiment of gratitude towards her as the benefactress who had opened a new world of love to her, the homeless one, by introducing her into her parental house.
Hertha would have considered it her duty to accompany the Countess Prachwitz when, after the explanation with her brother, she had retired to the dower-house; but her stepmother had herself opposed the plan, saying she would rather be alone with her God. Since which it had been the rule for Hertha to spend an hour with her every day, an hour in which, according to her lights, Johanna made a point of ministering to the madcap child's soul.
Hertha had to read bulky devotional books, into whose dreary waste of prayers a fervid hymn flamed up here and there like a bonfire on a rainy day.
In the middle of such an improving hour was it that mother and daughter were sitting together at the open window, the outside blinds of which were let down, so that a dim green dusk was all that was reflected within, of the brilliant sunlight without. Hertha read in a monotonous voice (which was a little husky from a too prolonged swim the day before) the good old formulas by which for centuries men in their direst need have found their spiritual daily bread. In the happy irresponsibility of her sixteen years, she did not let them disturb her. Indeed, the God to whom she prayed for the man she loved earnestly every night. Who spoke to her comfortingly out of the rustling leaves and wrathfully in the rush of the storm, was on the whole a stranger to her.
While the reading was going on, there was a knock. It was some one who knocked softly and timidly once, and then after a pause, as if gathering the necessary strength, a second time.
The countess was greatly put out at the interruption, so strictly forbidden at this hour of the afternoon.
"Go and see who it is, and send them away," she said.
Hertha went and opened the door, and found herself standing opposite the daintily clad figure of a young and beautiful woman, deadly pale, who looked at her with great imploring eyes; with difficulty she collected herself sufficiently to ask what she wanted.