he should regard the gossip of idle tongues if
it penetrated to his hiding-place.

Els uttered a sigh of relief. Surely Wolff must trust her! Yet what
viciously coloured reports might reach him from the Eysvogels! Now that
he would learn the actual truth from the most credible eye-witnesses she
no longer dreaded even the worst calumny.

No one appeared at supper except her father. Eva had begged to be
excused. She wished to remain undisturbed; but the world, with rude yet
beneficent hand, interrupted even her surrender to her grief for her
mother.

The tailor, who protested that, owing to the mourning for young Prince
Hartmann, he had fairly "stolen" this hour for the beautiful Ortlieb
sisters, came with his assistant, and at the same time a messenger
arrived from the cloth-house in the market-place bringing the packages
of white stuffs for selection. Then it was necessary to decide upon
the pattern and material; the sisters must appear in mourning the next
morning at the consecration, and later at the mass for the dead.

Eva had turned to these worldly matters with sincere repugnance, but Els
would not release her from giving them due attention.

It was well for her tortured soul and the poor eyes reddened by weeping.
But when she again knelt in the chamber of death beside her dear nuns
and saw the grey robe, which they all wore, the wish to don one, which
she had so often cherished, again awoke. No other was more pleasing to
her Heavenly Bridegroom, and she forbade herself in this hour to think
of the only person for whose sake she would gladly have adorned herself.
Yet the struggle to forget him constantly recalled him to her mind,
no matter how earnestly she strove to shut out his image whenever it
appeared. But, after her last conversation, must not her mother have
died in the belief that she would not give up her love? And the dead
woman's last words? Yet, no matter what they meant, here and now nothing
should come between her and the beloved departed. She devoted herself
heart and soul to the memory of the longing for her.

Grief for her loss, repentance for not having devoted herself faithfully
enough to her, and the hope that in the convent her prayers might obtain
a special place in the world beyond for the beloved sleeper, now revived
her wish to take the veil. She felt bound to the nuns, who shared her
aspirations. When her father came to send her to her rest and asked
whether, as a motherless child, s