The storm wailed and shuddered without, and splash, splash fell the rain from the leads.
“It brings the ghosts,” she added. She peered at the clock. “Mein Gott! It is–twenty minutes after one. You should be in bed,” she added.
“Do you think I have ever slept at the hour of one to two any night of all the long nights here?” answered Sophia Dorothea. “But this is the first time I have passed it in this dress–in the firelight.”
“There was a great clock in the corner,” said Madame von Arlestein in her indistinct, failing voice, “and when they shut him in it was just striking two.”
“Do you think,” asked the Princess violently, “that I did not hear it?”
She came again to the hearth, moving with the rigidity of age; the brocade hung loosely on her hollowed form, showing how the soft flesh that had once filled it out had shrunk and withered.
“What a life mine has been,” she said, standing as if she listened to the wind; “that one night and thirty-two years to think over it. For I have never been able to think of anything else, Annette.”
“Twenty minutes after one,” mumbled the Countess; “that was the time you opened the door and stepped into the kitchen—”
The Princess put her hand to her bosom.
“Annette, Annette, are there no spells to conjure him back? But if he came he would not know us–two old women!”