"'One just gives her a kiss. Master Robert,' said an old gardener, who happened to be passing with a watering-can.
"Then I can see him yet, how he suddenly let the plaits drop from his hands, stood there suffused with blushes and did not know where to look. Papa shook with laughter and Martha ran off as fast as she could. When I tried her door, she had locked herself in. Not till supper-time did she put in an appearance again. Her hair hung in disorder over her forehead, and beneath it she looked out dreamily and scared.
"When, to-day, I compare the pale, thin, little suffering face that fills my whole soul, with yonder rosy, chubby, roguish countenance as it gleams upon me sometimes from my earliest childhood, I can hardly realise that both can have belonged to one and the same being.
"How her long fair plaits fluttered in the wind! With what precocious, housewifely care her eyes scanned the long table where we all sat together, with apprentices and inspectors, waiting to be filled--a whole collection of hungry mouths. And how lustily each one helped himself, when, with her merry smile, she offered the dishes.
"Now only do I begin to understand what a pilgrimage of suffering she had to make, now that I am myself preparing for the long, sad journey, at the end of which a lonely grave awaits me, more lonesome even than hers.
"In those days I was a child and looked up unsuspectingly to her, who became my teacher when she herself had hardly put off childish ways.
"It was at that time that our affairs began to take a downward course. Papa had to struggle against debts; failure of crops, and floods--for three years in succession--destroyed any hope of improvement, and monetary cares gathered thicker and thicker around our home.
"In the household everything not absolutely necessary was dispensed with, our intercourse with the neighbouring estate owners was restricted, and even the old governess who had educated Martha and was now to have fulfilled her mission upon me, had to leave the estate.
"Martha, who was seven years older than I and just preparing to grow into her first long dress, stepped into her place. In this way, purely sisterly relations could not grow into existence between us. She was the protectress and I was the ward, until after we exchanged our rôles.
"I may have been about fourteen years old, when it struck me for the first time that Martha had strangely altered in manner and appearance. I ought, indeed, to have noticed it before, for I was accustomed to look about me with open eyes, but in the slow monotony of everyday life one easily overlooks the destruction that sorrow and time are working around us.