lmost wild in her passionate grief, but she had gone on a journey
at once with Jenny, and had spent the winter in Nice. Gertrude would
not go with them on any account. Her eyes, which had looked on such
misery, could not look out upon God's laughing world,--her shattered
nerves could not bear the gay whirl of such a life. She had stayed
behind with an old aunt--Aunt Louise slept almost all day, when she was
not eating or drinking coffee, and the young girl had learned all the
horrors of loneliness. She had been ill in body and mind, and when her
mother and sister had returned, she learned that one may be lonely even
in company, and lonely she had remained until the present day.

Urged by a longing for affection, she had again and again tried to find
excuses for her mother, and to adapt herself to her mode of life. She
had allowed herself to be drawn into the whirl of pleasure into which
the pleasure-loving woman had plunged so soon as her time of mourning
was over. She had tried to persuade herself that concerts, balls, and
all the gayeties of society really gave her pleasure and satisfied her.
But her sense of right rebelled against this self-deception. She
began to ponder on the vacuity of all about her, on this and that
conversation, on the whole whirl around her, and she grew less able to
comprehend it. She could not understand how people could find so much
amusement in things that seemed to her not worth a thought. The art of
fluttering through life, skimming the cream of all its excitements as
Jenny did, she did not understand. To wear the most elegant costume at
a ball, to stay at the dearest hotels on a journey, to be celebrated
for giving the finest dinners--all that was not worth thinking about.
Once she had asked if she might not read aloud in the evenings they
spent alone, as she used to do when her father was alive. After
receiving permission she had come in with a radiant face, bringing
"Ekkehard," the last book which her father had given her. With flushed
cheeks and sparkling eyes, she had read on and on, but as she chanced
to look up there sat Jenny, looking through the last number of the
"Journal of Fashion," while her mother was sound asleep. She did not
say a word but she never read aloud again.

The large tears ran suddenly down her cheeks. One of those moments had
suddenly come over her again, when she stretched out her arms
despairingly after some human soul that would understand her, that
would l