kissed him?"

In the midst of her distress she was overpowered by intense fatigue: her eyelids drooped above her eyes, and with her nightly prayer still on her lips she fell asleep.

Emma von Strachinsky did not sleep; she sat in the bare room adjoining the nursery, the room where she taught Erika her lessons. She wrote two very difficult letters to her husband's creditors, and then proceeded to sew upon a gown for her daughter. She was proud of the child's beauty as only the mother can be who has all her life long been conscious of being obliged to forego the gift of beauty for herself. She loved her daughter idolatrously,--the daughter whom she often treated with a severity verging upon injustice, and whom she sometimes avoided for days because the glance of those clear eyes troubled her.

The windows of the room were open, and looked out upon the road. The fragrance of ripened grain was wafted in from the earth outside, resting from its summer fruitfulness and saturated with the August sunshine. A song floated up through the silent night: the reapers were working by moonlight. The low murmur of the brook accompanied the song, and now and then could be heard the soft swish of the grain falling beneath the scythe. A cricket chirped.

Emma dropped her hands in her lap and gazed into vacancy.

Suddenly she started; a step approached the door of the room, and Strachinsky, smiling sentimentally, entered. "Emma," he said, tenderly, "have you written to Franks and Ziegler?"

"Yes," she replied, and her voice sounded hoarse. "There lie the letters. Read them, and see if they are what you wish."

"Not at all," her husband exclaimed, gaily. "I have implicit confidence in your tact. H'm! the perusal of such letters is a sorry amusement."

"Do you suppose that it was a pleasure to write them?" Emma asked, with some bitterness.

Strachinsky immediately assumed an injured air. "You are irritable again. One cannot venture upon the slightest jest with you. Do you suppose that I enjoy being forced to ask you to write the letters? Good heavens! it is hard enough, but--circumstances will have it so." He passed his hand over his eyes, and stroked his whiskers with an air of great dignity.

She was silent. He watched her for a while, and then said, "That eternal sewing is very bad for you. Come to bed."

"I cannot. I am not sleepy," she replied, plying her needle; "and, moreover, I must finish this frock; let me go on with it." She bent over her work with the air of one determined to complete a task.

Strachinsky stood beside her for a while longer, hesitating and uncertain: he picked up each small article upon the table, looked at it and laid it down again after the fashion of a man who does not know what to do with himself, then he sighed profoundly, yawned, sighed again, and without another word left the room with heavy, lagging footsteps.

When he was gone she laid aside her sewing, and went to the open window to breathe the fresh air. The bluish moonlight shone full upon the whitewashed walls of the peasants' cots crowned with their dark clumsy thatch; in the distance twinkled the little stream winding its plashing way directly across the village towards the river, its banks bordered with curiously-distorted willows that looked like crouching lurking gnomes, and spanned by the huge useless bridge. Bridge, willows, and cots all threw pitch-black shadows out into the glaring splendour of the moonlit night, which was absolutely free from mist and damp. Beyond the village stretched fields of grain and stubble in endless perspective, a surface of tarnished dull gold.

The song was still informing the silence.

At last it ceased, and shortly afterwards heavy, regular steps were heard passing along the road. The reapers were going home. They passed by Emma's windows, a little dark gray crowd of men; the scythes over their shoulders glimmered in the moonlight; then came a couple of women, bowed and weary, almost dropping asleep as they walked; and last of all the overseer, a young fellow whose hand clasped that of a girl at his side. How he bent over her! A low tender whispering sound reached Emma's ears through the dry August air which the night had scarcely cooled. She turned away, frowning. "How happy they look! and why?" she murmured to herself. Suddenly she smiled bitterly. Had she any right to sneer thus at others?--she? Surely if ever a woman lived who had believed in love and had married for love, she was that woman.

And whom had she loved? A poor weakling, who had never been worthy to unloose the latchet of her shoe!

Not only little precocious Erika, every sensible human being who had ever come in contact with the married pair had asked how such a union had been possible. And yet it was so simple a story,--so simple and commonplace,--the story of a woman lacking beauty, but gifted, enthusiastic, prone to romantic exaggeration, whose longing for affection had wrought her ruin.

Her parents belonged to the most ancient if not the most illustrious of the native Bohemian nobility; he was of doubtful descent. She had always been wealthy; he possessed nothing save a scheming brain and a soaring self-conceit that bore him triumphantly aloft through all the annoyances of life.

He was not entirely without talent, had had a good education, and was, previous to his marriage with Emma Lenzdorff, neither idle nor inactive, but possessed of a certain desire for culture, the secret springs of which, however, were to be found in an eager social ambition. At eighteen he entered the army: too poor to join the cavalry, and too arrogant to content himself among the infantry, he joined a Jäger corps. He had risen to the rank of captain when he was wounded in the Schleswig-Holstein campaign. He made his wife's acquaintance in a private hospital in Berlin, which she had arranged in her own house for the martyrs of the aforesaid campaign.

She was very young, very enthusiastic, and a widow,--widow of a cold, unloved northern German whom in accordance with family arrangements she had married while she was yet only a visionary child. The memory of her formal marriage inspired her with horror.

Before meeting Strachinsky she had given scope to her romantic tendencies by all sorts of exaggerated charitable schemes, and by a fanatical devotion to art and poetry. She had long been convinced that her thirst for affection could never be satisfied. No one had ever shown her any passionate devotion, and, conscious of her lack of beauty, she had sadly resigned herself to swell the ranks of those women whom reason might prompt a suitor to woo, but who could never hope to be wooed in defiance of reason.

The Pole had an easy task. That he was handsome even his enemies could not deny. And he knew how to make the most of his personal advantages: a century earlier he might have been taken for a Poniatowski, with a direct claim to the throne of Poland. His uniform was very becoming, and a wounded soldier is always interesting. As soon as he divined the young widow's weakness he wooed her with verses,--with passionate declarations of love.

Poor Emma! Her thirsty heart thrilled with the sudden bursting into bloom of its spring so long delayed! Her parents, who might have warned her of what she was bringing upon herself, were dead; she paid no heed to her mother-in-law, who strenuously opposed her second marriage. When Emma, with burning cheeks, and trembling to her finger-tips with emotion, repeated to her the Pole's exaggerated expressions of devotion, the elder woman rejoined, coldly, "And you believe the coxcomb?"

The words were to Emma like the sting from a