she left Nuremberg, nor
had she come prepared with any change of raiment. A woman more
wretched, more disconsolate, on whose shoulders the troubles of
this world lay heavier, never stood at an honest man's door to beg
admittance. If only she might have died as she crawled through the
streets!

But there she was, and she must make some petition that the door
might be opened for her. She had come all the way from Nuremberg to
this spot, thinking it possible that in this spot alone she might
receive succour; and now she stood there, fearing to raise the
knocker on the door. She was a lamb indeed, whose fleece had been
shorn very close; and the shearing had been done all in the sacred
name of religion! It had been thought necessary that the vile desires
of her human heart should be crushed within her bosom, and the
crushing had brought her to this. She looked up in her desolation at
the front of the house. It was a white, large house, as belonging to
a moderately prosperous citizen, with two windows on each side of the
door, and five above, and then others again above them. But there
seemed to be no motion within it, nor was there any one stirring
along the street. Would it not be better, she thought, that she
should sit for a while and wait upon the door-step? Who has not known
that frame of mind in which any postponement of the thing dreaded is
acceptable?

But Linda's power of postponement was very short. She had hardly
sunk on to the step, when the door was opened, and the necessity for
explaining herself came upon her. Slowly and with pain she dragged
herself on to her feet, and told the suspicious servant, who stood
filling the aperture of the doorway, that her name was Linda Tressel,
and that she had come from Nuremberg. She had come from the house of
Madame Staubach at Nuremberg. Would the servant be kind enough to
tell Herr Gruener that Linda Tressel, from Madame Staubach's house in
Nuremberg, was at his door? She claimed no kindred then, feeling that
the woman might take such claim as a disgrace to her master. When she
was asked to call again later, she looked piteously into the woman's
face, and said that she feared she was too ill to walk away.

Before the morning was over she was in bed, and her uncle's wife was
at her bedside, and there had been fair-haired cousins in her room,
creeping in to gaze at her with their soft blue eyes, touching her
with their young soft hands, and calling her Cousin Linda with