The hunchback stood at the door and, wrapping the portiere round him, looked at her closely and said, shaking his hunch:
"Father was so round and hollow; I don't see how he could be drowned."
"Be quiet; you do not love anybody!" shouted his sister.
"I simply cannot say nice words," he replied.
The father's corpse was never found, but the mother had been killed in the moment of the collision. Her body was recovered and laid in a coffin, looking as lean and brittle as the dead branch of an old tree—just as she had looked when she was alive.
"Now you and I are left alone," the sister said to her brother sternly, but in a mournful voice, after the mother's funeral; and the cold look in her grey eyes daunted him. "It will be hard for us: we are ignorant of the world and may lose much. What a pity it is that I cannot get married at once."
"Oh!" exclaimed the hunchback.
"What do you mean by 'Oh'?"
He said, after thinking a while:
"We are alone."