"Aren't we like Hansel and Grethel?" she asked, struck by the poetry of their situation. "Now tell me a pretty story of knights and princesses, and we shall be fifteen years old."
"You can feel so innocent?"
"Yes," she answered, "and so in love; not with you, you vain person, but with that chivalrous knight whom you are to have the honour of presenting me to. In old days it was the same, and don't you remember how furious it made Johanna? How furious!"
The grim picture of his sister rose spectre-like before him. He sank into a gloomy reverie, while she continued chattering.
"To speak honestly, I was gone on you then. You were such a thorough boy, but--what shall I say?--rather green. It seemed as if you wouldn't, or couldn't, see. Every evening I threw beautiful kisses out of the window down to your room, but you never noticed them. Yet all the same you were madly in love, and that annoyed Johanna terribly, and no wonder, as Ulrich was another bad case."
Ulrich's name that she thus let slip playfully over her lips made her pause. She gave Leo an anxious glance, and then gazed thoughtfully into the flames.
"Ah!" she sighed after a while, "who would have thought things would turn out as they did?"
"And are going to turn out," he muttered, shaken by impotent rage.
"What do you mean?" she said naïvely.
"Woman! have you no suspicion of the abyss towards which we are drifting?" he exclaimed, holding out his clenched fingers.