She felt the keys put into her nerveless hand--had she not been bowed down into the dust?
"Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity vaunteth not itself," said something in her heart.
"I will forgive him," said the young wife aloud. But her face was pale and rigid.
"Forgive, with those eyes?" asked Aunt Rosa. "And for what? For believing him less than an acknowledged--well, he is dead, God forgive him--than a man who was a perfect stranger to you? No, my little woman, take heart and go up to your Frank and--"
"I go to him?" she cried in cutting tones,--"I?" The bunch of keys fell clanging on the floor; with trembling hands she snatched up the dress she had worn the day before, and took the purse out of the pocket,--the purse which contained that fatal scrap of paper. For awhile she held the piece of paper in her hand, then she gave it to the old lady.
"I will not seem to you so childishly perverse," she said.
Aunt Rosa put on her glasses and read it. She started, and then a smile spread over her face. In great confusion she looked into Gertrude's face.
"Addie," she said, "you can bear witness that I have always been a most orderly person my whole life long."
"Yes, auntie, the most envious person must allow you that virtue."
"And yet last Christmas it happened to me to mislay a letter. It was to Linden from Wolff; for four whole days we searched for it. Let me see, that was the twenty-second of December--the letter was lost, and on the twenty-sixth, I happened to lift up my window-cushion and there was the thing. No one could have been gladder than I. I stayed up till late at night--Linden had gone to a party at the Baumhagens--and when at last he came home I gave him the letter and he put it carelessly in his pocket and said, 'Aunt Rosa, you shall hear it first, I have just been getting engaged.' And in the joy of his heart he took me in his arms as if I were still only eighteen. You see, and that"--she struck the bit of paper with her right hand--"that is a scrap of the letter, my little woman, and the date coincides exactly."