"For Heaven's sake!" she stammered, "what are you doing? Pray--pray leave me. It can never, it must never be!--never, never! A secret, that I dare not tell to any one, not even in the--"
"In the confessional," she was about to add. Suddenly she started back, in alarm at what she had already said, and bowed her face down upon her book again.
"This miserable, faint-hearted, wretched world of shopkeepers!" raved Rosenbusch, on his stool over opposite. "Can there still be bold and manly deeds? O Nanny! if it only were as it once was, I would come spurring up to your father's castle some fine night on my gallant charger. You would let down a rope-ladder from the donjon-window, and would swing yourself up behind me on my horse--and away we would go into the wide, wide world! But nowadays--"
"Hm! nowadays we have railroads," she murmured, slyly.
"Girl!" he cried, in a sepulchral voice, "are you really in earnest? You would--you have the courage? O dearest Nanny of my heart! If I should elope with you, you would love me so dearly that you would follow me to the end of the world--"
She shook her head. There was a sound like a suppressed giggle.
"Nonsense!" she said, "we need only go as far as Pasing. Then papa will steam by us; or we can do as another couple once did. They merely went to the top of the church of St. Peter and sat concealed there with the warden, and their people went searching about all over the country for them, while they sat there and laughed at them all."
"Nanny, love, you really will--oh, what a heavenly idea! To-morrow--if you are truly in earnest--to-morrow evening at this time--"
This time she actually laughed out loud, but she held her handkerchief before her face.
"Oh, stop!" she said, "I was only joking! It is absurd to talk of such a thing! Mother would worry herself to death, and besides--but we must go; Fanny has risen already."