Frau von Arnim nodded, satisfied by the steady, cheerful voice.
"You have your reward," she said. "Rightly enough, Wolff traces all his happiness back to you, and his love and gratitude are in proportion."
"To his happiness?" Hildegarde suggested, smiling. "In that case I ought to be more than satisfied. Although, perhaps, for my sake he tries to hide that fact, it is obvious from his letters that he never knew what the real thing was until Nora became his wife. And I believe it will be lasting. We know Nora so well. We know how good and loving and honest she is. I do not think she will ever disappoint him or us."
"And Wolff, of course, could not disappoint any one, not even though he were advertised as perfect," Frau von Arnim observed slyly. "So we need feel no alarm for the future. And now I must go back to my accounts."
There was a long unbroken silence. Hildegarde seemed really asleep, or at least too deep in her own thoughts to notice the significant rumblings overhead, and her mother was frowning over the division of income, or rather the stretching of income over the hundred-and-one things necessary to the "keeping up of appearances." The latter occupation had been the constant worry of Frau von Arnim's life. Her poverty had always been of the brilliant kind, but it had been poverty none the less for that, and now this change had come it was not even to be brilliant. Not that she felt any regret. The "brilliancy" had only been maintained as a sort of sop to the family traditions, and now that the family honour seemed to concentrate itself on Wolff, it was only natural that the other members would be ready to make every sacrifice to support him and save him from the curse of pecuniary troubles, which is the curse of two-thirds of the German nobility. So the old home was to be given up, and the old pill-box brougham and such of the family relics as would find no place in the narrow dimensions of an étage were to drift into the hands of strangers. Both Frau von Arnim and Hildegarde, brought up in the stern code of their old race, found this course of events perfectly correct, and they would have done no less even if they had not cared for Wolff. Thus the frown upon Frau von Arnim's brow was caused not so much by trouble or regret as by a natural dislike for the consideration of pfennige, and it was with a movement of almost relief that she looked up presently, aroused from her unloved task by the ringing of the front-door bell.
"That must be Herr Sonnenthal again," she said. "He has probably come to tell us how much the carriage has fetched. Would you mind if I saw him in here?"
Hildegarde assented, but her mother's supposition proved incorrect. The untidy charwoman who put in her head a minute later informed them that there was a strange gentleman downstairs inquiring after a certain Fräulein whose name she, the charwoman, had not been able to grasp, and that, failing her, he had requested the honour of a few minutes' conversation with the gnädige Frau herself.
Frau von Arnim looked puzzled as she studied the card.
"I think there must be some mistake," she said. "However, show him up here."
For some reason or other nothing was said of the unknown visitor. It is possible that, as the wild beasts of the forest have an instinctive prescience of an enemy's approach, so we, in our higher world of sensitiveness, receive indefinable warnings when mischance is about to overtake us or a personality to enter into our lives and change its whole course. Certain it is that neither Frau von Arnim nor Hildegarde were fully at their ease as their visitor entered the room, and their response to his correct, somewhat stiff bow was marked by that frigidity which seems to ask of itself "Who are you? What do you want with us?"