"Why have you taken up this Hertha?" he asked. "Your interest in the girl seems to me rather suspicious."
The old lady flushed like a maiden of sixteen. And as she looked up at him with her merry eyes full of truth and candour, she said almost apologetically--
"Leo dear, you know."
"No, really I don't," he answered, laughing.
Then she began to divulge her plans to him in detail. Hertha's maternal fortune was enormous, not by any means to be underrated; and there was only one drawback to the property she owned, and that was its being in Poland. Her mother before her marriage had fallen out with the family, and had to go to law with her own brother for her possessions. Through that all intercourse between Hertha and her Polish relations had been cut off. The only person to be consulted on the bestowal of her hand was her guardian, the old Judge Wessel.
"I have never met the old gentleman," she continued, "but we write to each other twice a year the most friendly letters. So there is nothing to fear from that quarter. I assure you, Leo, that you have only to raise your little finger, and the richest heiress in the country will be your wife."
She paused triumphantly. But instead of answering, he whistled his favourite Mexican air "Paloma" and smiled into vacancy.
His mother was hurt. "I have taken so much trouble to arrange it," she said. "It has cost me thousands of sleepless nights, and you don't even repay me with 'thank you.'"
"It takes two people to make a marriage, my mother," he replied. "I am an elderly good-for-nothing. I have been a vagabond, absentee landlord, and I am packed full of sins up to my throat. And she--she is a child."
"Next spring she will be seventeen," was the answer.