On the following afternoon Wilhelmine was sitting disconsolately in her attic. The book she was reading had fallen from her hands, and her eyes rested on the ugly blue walls of her room. She reviewed in her mind the events of the previous day; the scene in the church, and her subsequent departure therefrom, which she had managed so deftly that, though Müller was in the graveyard when she came out, she had evaded him, and joining Anna, who was waiting for her near the porch, she had succeeded in passing the pastor without staying to hear what he evidently wished to say. Frau von Grävenitz chid her sharply for interrupting the sermon, but she was silenced by Wilhelmine's angry retort and reminder of Müller's misdeeds. The Sunday afternoon and evening had passed without any unwonted occurrence. Wilhelmine was tortured by the fact that she had not told her mother of Friedrich's letter; she had not recovered it from Müller, though twice she had sent the servant-maid to demand its restitution.
She intended to reveal the whole story to her mother, when Monsieur Gabriel returned with the promised money; for she guessed that the object of his journey to Schwerin was the procuring of the sum. The light was failing rapidly, and Wilhelmine felt intensely dreary and sad. She turned over the leaves of the book which lay on her lap; it was a volume lent her by Monsieur Gabriel, a book written by Blaise Pascal. Her eye was caught by a sentence, and she read the wise words of the great thinker: 'Love hath its reasons which reason knoweth not.' Again her attention wandered from the page; her thoughts were busy with the possibilities of her destiny. With bitterness she realised that, for her, Love must be either a renunciation of ambition, a life passed with some simple countryman, or else a career, a profession, an abnegation of quiet days. Which should she strive for? 'What does it avail a man though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' The words came back to her; but no, she was not made for peaceful days, she would weary of them inevitably.
She heard a knock on the house door and, shaking off her unusual depression, she hurried downstairs. Monsieur Gabriel stood in the corridor explaining in his scholarly foreign German to the servant-maid, that it was absolutely necessary for him to see Fräulein von Grävenitz, even if madame her mother could not receive him, as he had a matter of importance to communicate. He smiled when he saw Wilhelmine—that good smile of his, which was at once so kind, so bright, and yet so unutterably sad.
'Ah! dear child!' he said, in French, 'I bring you good news. I have procured the money.'
Wilhelmine went quickly up to him, and taking his hand in both of hers, she drew him into the prim little dwelling-room where Frau von Grävenitz received her rare guests. 'How can I ever thank you?' she said as she closed the door.
'By thinking of me when you are far away,' he answered, 'and sometimes by sending me a letter to lighten my gloom.'
'Yes!' she said eagerly; 'but tell me how you procured this great sum?'
'I had a few old trinkets,' he answered, 'which I had carried with me from France. They were hidden in my travelling chest, and I had not even looked at them these many years. They reminded me of another life, a life which has nothing to do with the old schoolmaster of Güstrow,' he added with a sigh. He laid a packet on the table, cut the string with his knife, and began to undo four long rolls within, disclosing the bright edges of twenty-five golden gulden in each roll. 'Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, a hundred,' he counted out.
Wilhelmine looked curiously at the coins; she had seldom seen gold pieces before, and never in a large quantity. She laid her hand on one of the rouleaux. 'Gold is power, they say,' she murmured.
'The getting of gold is pain,' the old man answered, and he took her hand in his, drawing hers away from the golden heap.