"No, no," the girl denied, "I am not ill; go, only go; I am tired and want to sleep."
Brockelmann went to her room, shaking her head. "Well, well," she murmured, "I did think she would be sorry for the poor girl, but no!" She sighed, and closed the door behind her. But toward morning she was suddenly startled from her slumber by the violent ringing of a bell in her room.
"Good heavens, Anna Maria!" she cried. "She is ill!" In her heart the old woman still called her young mistress by her child's name. Hastily throwing on one or two garments she hurried through the cold passage, just lighted by the gray dawn. Anna Maria was sitting upright in her bed, a candle was burning on the table by her side, and lit up a face worn with weeping. The old woman saw plainly that the girl had been weeping, though she extinguished the candle at once.
"Brockelmann!" she called to her, but not as usual in the old imperious manner, and she now hesitated; "as soon as it is light, send for Gottlieb's mother; I want to talk with her about the girl. And now go," she added, as the old woman was about to say something, "I am so tired to-day!"
CHAPTER III.
"The time passes away, one scarcely knows what has become of it; even in my solitude, it does not seem long to me. Really, the starlings are here already. Where has the winter gone? Strange!"
Aunt Rosamond held this soliloquy at her chamber-window, as her gaze followed the little messengers of spring, who vanished so briskly into the wooden boxes, a large number of which had been placed for them on the trees and buildings. It was no sunny spring day there without; the clouds hung low and gray over the earth, and a warm, sultry wind tossed about the budding branches unmercifully, as if to shake them into complete awakening.
The old lady did not like the overcast sky at all, it put her out of humor. She could not wander about far out of doors, to be sure, but she would fain have seen the little spot of earth that lay stretched out before her window looking cheerful, and blue sky and sunshine lighting up the fresh green of the meadows, and the oaks in foliage.
"It ought to be always May or September here in the Mark," she used to say; "then it would be the loveliest country in the world. In winter one does best to draw the curtains, so as not to cast a single look out of doors, it looks so melancholy outside, brown upon brown, with a shade of dirty gray."