achment, 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