"Why yes, to see her father--and she made up her mind very suddenly. Herr Feyertag said it would be a good opportunity, because he was going himself this evening, but my mistress would not hear of such a thing at first, but the other visitor had scarcely gone--"
"Another visitor? Who--don't make me drag the words out of you so--"
"But how should I know who it was? I never saw the lady in my life, she didn't tell her name, and I could not hear what she said to my mistress. She was very beautiful, and very elegantly dressed; after she'd gone the room smelt of violets a long time, and my mistress paced up and down, looking very pale and talking to herself. And then when I brought her dinner she didn't touch a mouthful, and I didn't dare to ask her any questions; she said nothing to me, except that she'd made up her mind to go to Berlin. So about twilight she went out with a little satchel, and didn't even allow me to go with her to the station. When she'd gone, I felt very sad and anxious, though I didn't know why, and I was just going to bed--but what ails you, Herr Doctor? Shall I get you a glass of water?"
He had sunk down on the sofa and his eyes were closed as if a stroke of apoplexy had benumbed his brain.
When, after some time, he opened his eyes again, he saw the maid-servant, who had no idea what all this could mean, still standing helplessly in the middle of the room. "What are you doing here, Kathrin?" he said harshly. "Go to bed, leave me, I want nothing more to-day. No, no light. I can see well enough. Good night."
The faithful servant glided silently out of the room, and he sank back again in the corner of the sofa, helplessly giving himself up, in the loneliness and darkness, to his bitter anguish.
CHAPTER VIII.
So he had lost her--his brave little wife, his good comrade, the friend who sympathized with all his moods and thoughts, all his feelings and wishes! The right hand must do without the left, the complete man had become a pitiful fragment, a crumbling mass of ruin.
The blow was so sudden, so unexpected, that for the first hour his bewilderment swallowed up all sense of pain. If anything earthly had ever seemed positive and secure from loss, it had been the possession of this heart. The secret fear (which sometimes blends with the joy of passionate love,) that exuberance of feeling may fall from its exaltation and undergo the common lot of change, he had never known. He had never toiled in anxiety and doubt to win the woman's love; it had been his long before he suspected it; why should he fancy that it could ever change! And now she had deserted him!
No feeling of reproach or bitterness, that she failed him now when he needed her more than ever, rose in his heart. He esteemed her too highly to believe her capable of any petty irritability, any ordinary feminine weakness, such as going "to make herself missed." If she could feel that her place was no longer beside him, she must have had good reasons for her belief, reasons which would bear the examination not only of her sorely tried heart, but of her reason. What they might be, well as he knew her, was not clear to him. Did she not know him too, and know he would never leave her? But he also knew whom she had seen, and that this visitor had been the cause of her sudden resolution he was perfectly convinced.