"She has gone to carry home some copying that the pastor gave her to do. She will be here very soon. Do not be startled at seeing her look so badly. We have lived wretchedly of late."
Johannes took her hand. "Gretchen, can't you hide me somewhere? I am not sufficiently composed to see her at present,--I must collect myself."
"Yes, come into our kitchen. I had better prepare Ernestine, too, for seeing you,--she is weak, and must be treated with great caution."
She conducted him into the little, cold, dark room that she called a kitchen. "Look! the poor girl has cooked our wretched dinners in this place for the last five months, and shed many a tear when she spoiled anything. Oh, if you could have seen, as I have, our proud Ernestine work and struggle and starve, you would not have refrained so long from putting an end to our misery."
"It is well that I could not see it. I should have been unnerved, and spoiled all by precipitation."
"Forgive me, but indeed you are hard. Hilsborn would not have left me here one instant longer than he could have helped."
"And he would have been right, Gretchen. But Ernestine and you are very different characters. She needed, and would have, this struggle for life,--even now I tremble lest she should refuse to let me put an end to it."
"Oh, no! when you see Ernestine, you will acknowledge that it was high time to hasten to her. Since all her efforts to obtain a situation have failed, her spirit seems well-nigh broken. I think in a little while she would have been hopelessly embittered, and her health would have given way entirely."
Johannes threw himself into the wooden chair by the window, where, in the midst of the hard prose of her life, Ernestine had been visited by such wondrous dreams. "Here is a letter to you, my dear Gretchen, from Hilsborn. He would have been only too glad to come with me, but every moment of his time is in demand."
"He is good and true," said Gretchen, "and I know how he trusts in me, but I cannot leave Ernestine until her future is assured."