For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice—
"Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn't happen; every day it is worse and I can't grapple with it. I'm not up to it. If only they'd speak out! but it's this silence!" She seemed to pull herself together and went on more quietly: "You know that Rupert and I have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open, dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most wonderful thing, and to me!—I cannot tell you what he was to me. I suppose, for the very reason that we were so much to one another, we did not make any other very close friends. I had girls in Dresden, of course, and there were men at school and college for whom he cared, but I think there can have been few brothers and sisters who were so entirely together in every way. A month ago that all ceased."
She flung her head back with a sharp defiant movement as though the memory of it hurt her.
"I've told you this before. I talked to you about it when you were here last. But since then he has become much worse and I am afraid that anything may happen. I have no one to go to. It is killing my mother, and then—you were a friend of his."
"I hope that I am now."
"That is the horrible part of it. But it seems now that all this agitation, this trouble, is directed against you."
"Against me"
"Yes, the other evening he spoke about you—here—furiously. He said you must never come here again, that I must never speak to you again. He said that you had done dreadful things. And then when I asked him he could not tell me anything. He seemed—and you must look on it in that light, Mr. Dune—as though he were not in the least responsible for what he said. I'm afraid he is very, very ill. He is dreadfully unhappy, and yet he can explain nothing. I too have been very unhappy, and mother, because we love him."
"If he wishes that I should not come here again—-" Olva began.
"But he is not responsible. He really does not know what he is doing. He never had the smallest trouble that he did not confide it to me, and now—-"