"Brockelmann came toward me in consternation. 'The master is here,' she called to me, 'but Anna Maria will not believe it.' I went into her room without knocking; she was sitting on the little sofa, her New Testament before her on the table. In the dying daylight her great blue eyes looked forth almost weirdly from the face worn with grief.
"'Klaus has come, my child,' I said, going up to her.
"She looked at me incredulously.
"'I have seen him, Anna Maria; it is true.'
"'Where is he, then?' she asked. 'Why does he not come to me?'
"'My dear child'—I took her hand—'Klaus is with Susanna.'
"She let her head drop. 'But then he will come,' she said; 'he must come, of course! He will want something to eat, and he will want to scold me. I wish he would tell me how bad I am, how unjustly I have acted, so that I might tell him everything, everything that lies so heavily on my heart. Perhaps, perhaps my voice may penetrate him once more, when he thinks of all that we have lived through in common, when he thinks how I love him!'
"I pressed her hand and sat down silently beside her; that sweet, clear 'Klaus, Klaus! my dear Klaus!' still rang in my ears, and then the sobbing. And now, if he should hear from her own lips why she wept? If he should lift the white cloth from her brow? The calmest man would become a tiger, and he was not calm, any more than Anna Maria—God help them! I trembled at the thought of those two standing face to face.
"And the darkness fell and concealed the objects in the room; before the windows the branches of the old elms swayed, ghost-like, in the wind, ever bending toward us, as if beckoning with their lean arms. And Anna Maria waited! At every sound in the house she started up—I thought I heard her heart beat—and each time she was deceived.
"At last, at last! That was his step on the stairs! She rose, all at once, to her full, proud height. 'Klaus,' she said, 'my brother Klaus!'—as if she must be encouraged in mentioning the entire, intimate, sacred relation in which they stand to each other—'my only brother!' In these few words lay the destiny of her whole life.