“What circumstances?” she asked, looking up anxiously in the young man’s face.
“Why, now your father and mother are dead—”
“What? father and mother dead?” exclaimed the poor girl, before the word had fairly left his lips.
He nodded assent. Anna covered her face with both hands and sobbed convulsively.
It was a very strange scene down there in that gloomy cave. Those two young people—one of them in his shirt sleeves—the other in her wet sarong and kabaja, indeed, one might say, scarcely dressed at all—sitting there side by side on a bare slab of rock. She with her face buried in her hands and sobbing as if her heart would break, he gazing down eagerly and lovingly upon her, striving, as it were, to fathom the thoughts which were rising in that maiden breast, and upon which he felt that his happiness depended.
“But, can it be true?” said she at last amidst the sobs which convulsively shook her entire frame, “can it be true? Oh, Charles, you could not be cruel enough to invent such a story. Charles, Charles, what am I to believe?”
“Anna, dearest Anna, what do you think of me? do you really think me capable of thus trifling with your most sacred feelings. Indeed, you are misjudging me, Anna.”
She kept on weeping bitterly and was inconsolable. He gently drew her to him, trying to comfort her in her distress. And now she offered no resistance; but she rather nestled up to his breast. Now that she was an orphan, and that she knew she was alone in the world, she sought for protection with the man whom she had always faithfully loved.
“Both dead,” she kept repeating again and again, “what did they die of? Oh, tell me how it happened! You have come straight from Santjoemeh, and you must know all about it.”
“No, my love, on the contrary I know just nothing at all. When I left Santjoemeh both your parents were in excellent health and spirits. On the very morning when I set out with Grenits—”