A melancholy little smile flitted across her face, which made her look years older.
"You see, I am not so foolish as you thought," she said. "I have cried a good deal in my life. Oh yes! We were speaking of the violent temper.... Well, I have got it too. If I am angry I am blind, and don't know what I do, and my blood rushes into my head. I shall come to a bad end one day. Mamma says I ought to pray, and beseech the Lord Jesus every day to change my bad blood. But I am not sure that it would be right. For if I have my bad times, I have my good too. No one dreams what they are. Elly, for example. You know what she is like? always placid, always soft. I believe the sun shines brighter for me than for her, that to my eyes green is greener, and ... the moon ... how it sails up there.... She doesn't see it.... She is always too sleepy. So I say to myself often, every unhappiness may be happiness if one knows just how to enjoy things like that."
He laid his hands on his forehead and stared at her. "Great God!" he thought, "what magic there is in a young creature like this!"
She had talked herself into a high pitch of excitement, and, without heeding him, went on--
"Yes, and then he left me at Geneva and went to get married, and that is how you and I come to be related, you see. And when I heard that I had a new mother I wept for joy; but the others--the girls, you know--frightened me, and said, 'What will become of you now you have got une marâtre?' for there we all talked French. But I thought to myself, 'Wait till she sees you; she will sure to be kind out of pity.' And, because Madame Guignaud wished me to pay my respects to her beforehand, I wrote her a letter. But there was not much respect in it, and it began like this: 'Ma mère voici une malheureuse enfant qui vous implore'--and so on. However, it did very well, and when she came she was good and loving to me, and my heart leapt out to her. Ah! in those days she often smiled. She seemed to love my father very much, and I hoped better days were now in store for me, and I should stay at home, but, properly speaking, there was no home. He refused to stay on the estate my dead mamma had left to him, for he said that he was ashamed to be 'mademoiselle's guest.' He meant me by 'mademoiselle.' His own estate, Malkischken, as you know, was so dilapidated that we had to get the furniture for three rooms on hire from a carpenter in Münsterberg. That's why we didn't stay long there, but started travelling about. We went to Baden-Baden, Spa, Nice; and everywhere it was the same, the same waiters and electric-bells, every morning two eggs with coffee, and at dinner twelve courses; but if one was hungry in between, one had to starve, because we were charged en pension. Mamma was always sad, and papa always angry with me, and in want of money. Oh! it was terrible. One day he flew at me with his riding-whip, and was going to beat me, when mamma sprang between us and said, 'The child shall go away to-day, or----' What the 'or' meant I didn't understand, but he grew as white as a sheet, and the next morning I went away, first back to Geneva, where I stayed till I was thirteen. That is where Ada was----"
She stopped, thinking with a start of the letter she had left unblotted on the writing-table.
"Which Ada?"
"Ada von Wehrheimb, my greatest friend," she replied; and, turning her head aside, she added with a slight blush, "She is engaged already."
"Ha! ha!" he laughed, "quickly fixed up. Well, and then?"
"Then ... then." She lost the thread of her narrative for a moment. His laugh had put her out.