"Oh, heavens," she cried, making a supreme effort to control herself, "I must stop crying! What a disgrace it would be if any of those people should see me!"
Apparently there was a great gulf in her mind between Goswyn and "those people." He was glad of it. For a while he was sympathetically silent, and then he said, kindly, "Countess Erika, would you rather keep your sorrow to yourself, or will you confide it to me?"
His mere presence had had a soothing effect; her tears ceased to flow; she only shivered slightly from time to time.
"Ah, it was not a sorrow," she explained,--"only a distress,--something like what I felt on the night when I first came to Berlin. It was not homesickness,--what have I to be homesick for?--but suddenly I felt so lonely among all those strangers who stared at me curiously but cared nothing for me. I seemed to feel a great chill around me: it all hurt me; their way of speaking, their way of looking down upon everything that was not as fine and proud as themselves, went to my heart. You--you cannot understand it, for you have grown up in the midst of it; you have breathed this air from your childhood."
"I think you do me injustice, Countess Erika," he interposed. "I can understand you perfectly, although I have grown up in the midst of it all."
"I felt as if I hated the people," she went on, her large melancholy eyes flashing angrily, "and then--then, amidst all this elegance and arrogance,"--she named these characteristics in a perfectly frank way, as if they were elements but lately introduced into her life,--"the thought came to me of the misery in which I grew up, and of all the little pleasures and surprises which my mother prepared for me in spite of our poverty,--ah, such poor little pleasures!--those people would laugh at the idea of any one's enjoying them,--but they were very much to me. Oh, if you knew how my mother used to look at me when she had contrived a new gown for me out of some old rag!--No one will ever look at me so again. And then"--she clinched the hand that held the poor wet handkerchief--"to think that my mother belonged of right to all this bright gay world, and to remember how she died, in what sordid distress, and that it is past,--that I can give her nothing of all that I have---- My heart seemed breaking." She paused, breathless.
"Poor Countess Erika!" he murmured, very gently. "It is one of the miseries of this life to remember our dead and to be powerless to be kind to them. All that we can do is to bestow as much love as we can upon the living."
"But whom have I to bestow my love upon?" Erika cried, with such an innocent insistence that, in spite of his pity, Goswyn could hardly suppress a smile. "I cannot offer it to my grandmother: she would not know what I meant, and would simply think me ill."
"But in fact," he said, now openly amused, "it is not to be supposed that you will all your life have only your grandmother to love."
"You mean that----" She looked at him in sudden dismay.