"Hm! I really do not know how much is necessary to maintain two daughters; perhaps I do not send her enough for you. She ought to have let me know. I do not wish that my children should be pinched, as--as----"
"As they seem to be from the looks of my shabby wardrobe," Stella said, with a laugh. "Well, we are not quite so badly off, after all. If it be a question of buying books or curios, we can always scrape the money together; but if one wants a pair of new boots, the purse is empty."
The colonel tugged discontentedly at his moustache.
"I beg you to write to Franzi and ask her if she needs money," he began afresh. "I am, to be sure, living now upon my capital, but your share is secured to you, and I shall not last long."
At first his meaning escaped her; she gazed at him with wide eyes; then, as she comprehended at last, the pen fell from her fingers, and she burst into a flood of tears.
"Hush, hush, my darling; do not torment yourself beforehand. Perhaps I describe my condition to you as worse than it really is," he said, leaning tenderly over her, and, putting his hand beneath her chin, he looked deep into her dark eyes. "If sunshine can make a man well I am all right."
No, it was too late,--too late! His physical strength could never be restored, his lungs nothing could heal; but with his child beside him his soul and heart gained health and strength. Since those first fair years of his married life, he had never been so happy as now, although he seldom quite forgot that he stood on the brink of the grave.
Once, on a damp muggy November evening in a Viennese suburb he had seen a drunkard staggering along the wall in a narrow street, quite unable to find his way. A policeman was just about to take him into custody, when a little girl, muffled in rags and with a pale wizened face, suddenly appeared beside him out of the darkness, seized him by his red, trembling, swollen hand, and called in a hoarse, anxious voice, without impatience or harshness, but not without authority, 'Father, come home!' And the drunkard, who had paid no heed to the jeers of the passers-by, nor to the admonition of the policeman, hung his head, and without a word followed the weak, helpless little creature like a lamb. The colonel had stood and looked after them until the darkness swallowed them up. He recalled distinctly the girl's thin yellow braids, her long chin, the sordid red-and-black plaid shawl which she wore about her shoulders, and the worn old laced boots, far too big for her little feet and coming half-way up her naked little blue legs, and continually in her way as she walked.
The little episode had made a painful impression upon him for a time, and then he had forgotten it. Now it arose in his memory, but transfigured, and as, clasping his daughter's hand, he went on to his grave, he compared himself in his secret soul with the drunkard led home by the child.