d
gentle countenance of the stranger, smiling at her as if saying, You
are a strange child!

Manna returned thoughtfully to her cell; she looked out of the window
and saw Pranken just entering a boat with his horse, and he was soon on
the opposite shore.

"Ah, Herr von Pranken!" cried a loud voice, and the echo repeated the
sound.

What voice was that?

Pranken hurried up the bank and vanished behind the willows.

Manna longed for the time when the world would be shut out from her,
and no more unrest could come over her, for now she was deeply
disturbed. There was Pranken; here, the tutor's mother--what did it all
mean? She took her book of devotions, but could not succeed in drawing
her thoughts from the subjects which occupied them.

In the mean time, the Professorin was listening to the Superior's
account of Manna's strange nature, which seemed really to hold two
natures within it, one, humble and submissive, almost without a will of
its own; the other, struggling, defiant, and self-willed. She had a
true, earnest character, too serious, perhaps, for a girl of seventeen;
she was often unable to, hold her feelings under control, but who could
always do that at her age? A weight lay on her spirits which was
uncontrollable; it plainly had its source in the child's keen sense of
the discord between her parents and its influence upon herself. The
Superior asked Frau Dournay to tell her more of the characteristic
peculiarities of the parents, but she evaded the subject.

The appearance, as well as the bearing, of the two ladies offered a
sharp contrast. The Professorin's figure was full, and in her face
there was a constant expression of wide-awake animation; her hands were
round and plump; the Superior was tall and thin, her expression severe
and earnest, as if just a moment before she had given some positive
order, or was on the point of giving one; her hands were long and
perfectly shaped. Both women had experienced hard trials: the
Professorin had won a gentle, smiling content; the Superior, a complete
preparation to meet all events with firm and stoical endurance.

The first greeting between these early friends, after nearly thirty
years of separation, had been a strange one, the Superior not hearing,
or seeming not to hear, that Frau Dournay addressed her just as she had
in the old days.

"I did not think I should ever see you again in this world," she had
said directly, and when the Professorin tried to