is young one knows too——"

"For shame, Märtensen!" This came vehemently. "You know what I have said. Take your Marieken and go. I will have no frivolous maids in my house!"

The door was now opened wide, and an old woman came out, her wrinkled face red with excitement.

"Come, lass," she called to the girl, who had just put her apron over her eyes again; "troubles don't last forever! She'll feel it herself some day yet! Driving away my girl as if she had been stealing!" And without greeting the old lady, she seized her daughter by the arm and drew her away with her.

Rosamond von Hegewitz turned slowly to the door. A half-mocking, half-earnest expression lay on the wise old face. "Bon soir, Anna Maria!" said she, as she entered the brightly lighted sitting-room.

A girl rose from the chair before the massive secretary, went toward the new-comer, and received her with that formality which at the beginning of our century had not yet disappeared from the circle of gentle families, pressing to her lips the outstretched hand with an expression of deepest respect.

"Good evening, aunt; how are you feeling?"

It was the same rich voice that had spoken before, and, like it, could belong only to such a fresh young creature. Anna Maria von Hegewitz was just turned eighteen, and the whole charm of these eighteen years was woven about her slender figure and the rosy face under her braids of fair hair. In contradiction to this girlishness, a pair of deep gray eyes looked out from beneath the white forehead, seriously, and with almost a look of experience, which, with a peculiar self-conscious expression about the mouth, lent a certain austerity to the face.

"Thank you, my dear, I am well," replied the old lady, seating herself at the round table before the sofa, upon which were burning four candles in shining brass candlesticks. "Don't let me interrupt you, ma mignonne. I see I have broken in upon your writing; are you writing to Klaus?"

"I have only been looking over the grain accounts, aunt; I shall be done in a moment. I shall not write again to Klaus, for he must return day after to-morrow at the latest. If you will excuse me a moment——"

"Oh, certainly, child. I will occupy myself alone meanwhile." The old lady drew her knitting-work from the silk bag and began to work, at the same time glancing dreamily about the large, warm, comfortable room.

She had known it thus long since; nothing in it had been altered since her youth—the same deep arm-chairs around the table, the artistic inlaid cupboards, even the dark, stamped leather wall-paper was still the same, and the old rococo clock still ticked its low, swift to-and-fro, as if it could not make the time pass quickly enough. And there at the desk, where the young niece was sitting, her only brother had worked and calculated, and at that sewing-table on the estrade at the window had been the favorite seat of the sister-in-law who died so young. But how little resemblance there was between mother and daughter!

The old lady looked over toward her again. The girl's lips moved, and the slender hand passed slowly with the pencil down the row of figures on the paper. "Makes five hundred and seventy-five thaler, twenty-three groschen," she said, half-aloud. "Correct!

"Now, then, Aunt Rosamond, I am at your service." She extinguished the candle, locked the writing-desk, and bringing a pretty spinning-wheel from the corner, sat down near her aunt, and soon the little wheel was gently humming, and the slender fingers drawing the finest of thread from the shining flax. For a while the room was quiet, the silence broken only by the howling of the storm and the crackling of the burning log in the stove.

"Anna Maria," began the old lady at last, "you know I never interfere with your arrangements, so pardon me if I ask why you send Marieken away."

"She has a love affair with Gottlieb," replied the niece, shortly.

"I am sorry for that, Anna Maria; she was always a girl who respected herself; ought you to act so severely?"

"She gives him her supper secretly, and runs about the garden with him on pitch-dark nights. I will not have such actions in my house, and know that Klaus would not approve of it either." The words sounded strangely from the young lips.

"Yes, Anna Maria "—Rosamond von Hegewitz smiled "if you will judge thus! These people have quite different sentiments from us, and—and you cannot know, I suppose, if their views are honest?"

"That is nothing to me!" replied Anna Maria. "They cannot marry, because they are both as poor as church mice. What is to come of it? The girl must leave; you surely see that, dear aunt?"

The old lady now laughed aloud. "One can see, Anna Maria, that you know nothing yet of a real attachment, or you would not proceed in so dictatorial a manner."

The slightest change came over the young face. "I will not know it, either!" she declared firmly, almost turning away.

"But, sweetheart," came from the old voice almost anxiously, "do you think that it will always be so with you? You are eighteen years old—do you think your heart will live on thus without ever feeling a passion? And do you expect the same of your brother, Anna Maria? Klaus is still so young——"

The little foot stopped on the treadle of the wheel, and the gray eyes looked in amazement at the speaker.

"Don't you know then, aunt, that it is a long-established matter that Klaus and I should always stay together? Klaus promised our mother on her death-bed that he would never leave me. And I go away from Klaus? Oh, sooner—sooner may the sky fall! Don't speak of such possibilities, Aunt Rosamond. It is absurd even to think of."

"Pardon me, Anna Maria"—the words sounded almost solemn—"I was present when your dying mother took from Klaus his promise never to leave you, always to protect you. But at the same time to forbid him to love another woman, a woman whom his heart might choose, she surely did not intend!"

"Aunt Rosamond!" cried the girl, almost threateningly.

"No, my child, I repeat it, your mother was much too wise, much too just, to wish such a thing; she was too happy in her own marriage to wish her children—But, mon Dieu, I am exciting myself quite uselessly; you have such a totally false conception of this promise."

"Klaus told me so himself, Aunt Rosamond," declared the girl, in a tone which made contradiction impossible.

Aunt Rosamond was silent; she knew well that all talking would be vain, and that nothing in the world could convince Anna Maria that any object worthy of love beside her beloved brother could exist. "Nous verrons, ma petite," thought she, "you will not be spared the experience either!"

And now her thoughts wandered far back into the past, to the night when Anna Maria was born. A terrible night! And as they passed on, there came a day still more terrible; in the heavy wooden cradle, adorned with crests, lay, indeed, the sweetly sleeping child, but the mother's eyes had closed forever, not, however, without first looking, with a fervid, anguished expression, at the little creature that must go through life without a mother's love! And beside her bed had knelt a boy of fifteen, who had to promise over and over again to love the little sister, and protect and shield her.

How often had Aunt Rosamond told this to the child as she grew up; how often described to her how she had been baptized by her mother's coffin, how her brother had held her in his arms and pressed her so closely to him, and wept so bitterly. Indeed, indeed, there was not another brother like Klaus von Hegewitz, that Aunt Rosamond knew best of all.

She remembered how he had watched for nights at the child's bed when she lay ill with measles; with what unwearied patience he had borne with her whims, now even as then; how carefully he had marked out a course of instruction and selected teachers for her, looked up lectures for her, read and rode with her,