cold embrace. When a few hours later I returned from giving some lessons, my father was dead."
Minna remained quiet for a long time, with downcast eyes; the corners of her mouth twitched, and I expected every moment that she would burst into tears. Suddenly she lifted her eyes and looked at me with a tearless, but singularly earnest and piercing look, as if wondering what effect her narrative had produced on me. Surely she was saying to herself: "No doubt you now think me very nasty! I sincerely wish I was better, but anyhow I will not make myself out to be better than I am." Her face was very sorrowful, and I was convinced that it was more this thought than the painful recollections that caused her troubled expression.
I myself was strangely moved, and would willingly have pressed her hand; but we were seated a few paces apart, and the workmen were close to us. A pressure of my hand would have made her understand the whole depth of my feelings for her better than any words, which on such an occasion are enshrouded in shame at their own feebleness. I told her I had long suspected that something sad in her past lay heavily upon her, but that I had no idea it was so deeply rooted in the whole of her childhood and development.
At this remark her face assumed a peculiar, suspicious and almost ironical expression, which I well knew.
"But you have only dwelt on the dark side of your life," I said, to change the subject. "How is it you have not mentioned Mr. and Mrs. Hertz? They were already in Dresden in those days, I suppose?"
"Yes, but I only made their acquaintance at that time, just at my father's funeral.… The relationship with Aunt Thea was so distant, really none at all … so
