Chapter VII: Fanny (2)

"But naturally, we'll get him the best, with six or eight blades!" cried Fanny very pleased. Anything they needed except that eternal food and raiment and fuel was a welcome suggestion. Fanny did love to give people things they _could_ live without, not just bread and coal and shoes. It got monotonous to one of her temperament. Even such a little thing as a knife for a boy struck an agreeably releasing note. She kept looking at the delicate figure. It imparted a pleasant sensation to her fingers as she touched it. It was quite evident that Ferry had talent. All was coming around as Tante Ilde had hoped.

"But Ferry is ill," she continued with her gentlest look. "He has night-sweats sometimes, and always a little cough."

"Ach, the poor Buberl!" cried Fanny warmly.

"How easy Fanny makes things," her aunt was thinking, yet somehow she still hesitated.

Fanny was passing her hand again over the little figure which kept inviting the caress of her long, white fingers, of her soft, rosy palm.

"Hermann says he must go to the country,--a bit high,--if he is to be saved and at his age one can't delay."

So it was done--as easy as that after all. That little wooden peasant woman cried out not alone of young talent but of fresh air, the fruits of the field, you couldn't get away from it, not that Fanny was trying to; further more the familiar story of family needs, now one thing now another, chased away the last trace of embarrassment. She was on the firmest of grounds _there_, only she was thinking again how old and ill her aunt was looking and did not answer immediately. When she did it was to exclaim warmly again:

"But naturally! Of course we must send him to the country. Manny will tell us where." Then Fanny, who was, indeed, as Pauli said, "a good fellow" and no fool either added, "Don't you want to take the money to Irma yourself?"

So that was all it was--that stone-heavy act! Light as thistledown really--because Fanny was Fanny.

Then suddenly as she sat there looking at her, for she knew not how long, with still unspent treasures of love in her look, she saw that Fanny's eyes were wet, not because of Ferry either, he could be helped, but because of other things, things that she, her poor aunt, didn't know about. She saw that for all Fanny's gayety there were rings around her lovely eyes and that she was pale under that merest touch of rouge. The merest touch was all she ever used. She was too wise as well as too lovely to be the painted woman. Fanny hung out no signs.

Then Frau Stacher found herself saying to her niece who lived just off the Kaerntner Street:

"Fanny, precious one, you too, have some grief."

Frau Stacher was seeing all things from a great but clear distance. Things stood out very sharply now that that feverish blur seemed suddenly to have been wiped from her eyes. It was as if she, Ildefonse Stacher, stood on a mountain and saw the world, a valleyed plain, spread out before her. Mortals dwelt in it, doing their little best or their little worst. Sharp as their figures were it was still too far to see what exactly was their best and what their worst. Legions of them. Hosts of them. She saw Fanny fighting under deep-dyed colors, in an innumerable army of women, drawn up in array against the sons of other women. The look she bent upon her niece as she turned from the contemplation of the armies in the plain became more tender, more grave.

Fanny's eyes flooded with tears under that look; hanging crystal a moment about her dark lashes, they fell slowly leaving smooth, shining, white little roads down her cheeks with just that touch of rouge. Such a little thing as that Frau Stacher could focus her eyes on,--even after the immensity of the plain.

Fanny went over and knelt by her aunt who had always loved her--who loved her now--and put her shining head against that thin breast and wept. Fanny hadn't wept, except in rage, for a long time, and there were many tears to fall.

"I can't bear it, I can't bear it," she whispered, but she didn't say what she couldn't bear and Tante Ilde didn't ask her, only pressed that gleaming head more closely to her. And Fanny should have noticed how strangely her aunt was breathing when she had her head there against her breast. But suddenly she got up and said something about her nerves being "total kaput" and went into her bedroom and closed the door.

Maria crept in from the kitchen.

"It's the Count," she whispered, "I'm afraid we're going to lose him. Fanny adores the ground he walks on. A fine gentleman, a Cavalier," (Maria pronounced it "cawlier" in her soft, thick Viennese) "but not a kreutzer to bless himself with and a South American girl whose Papa has more head of cattle than in all Europe, is crazy about him and wants to marry him. Whatever we'll do, I don't know. She's that jumpy when the bell rings, she's afraid it's bad news coming in at the door. His family is ruined by the Peace and his father commanding and his mother praying him to save them, and four unmarried sisters too. A bad mess we're in and what will be the end? I went to the fortune-teller a week ago,--a wonder,--and she saw cattle, cattle everywhere and told me I was to beware of them, but how can I beware of stupid cattle stamping about in South America?" asked Maria helplessly, resentfully. "I knew all the time what she meant--and saying, too, that she saw a letter coming. Oh, I've been that worried! Naturally I haven't told Fanny, but I've been waiting for that letter ever since. You don't know Fanny," Maria's eyes filled with tears, "one day she says she will kill herself and another that she's going into a convent," she whispered dismally, after a cautious look at the closed door; "and if Fanny ever gets started _that_ way, she'll make Maria Magdalena look about like this," and she proceeded to measure a negligible quantity of the surrounding atmosphere between her thumb and forefinger. There was, however, pride in her voice.

Frau Stacher was listening vaguely. For all her deep interest in Fanny, she was finding it difficult to focus her thoughts. Things were getting blurred again.

Maria kept on, a warning note in her voice, "I'll feel sorry for the family if Fanny doesn't hold out," (Maria, it will be seen, was at the other side of "holding out"--the far side.) "She bought the villa at Moedling last year and we put a lot of money in England through a Jew," here Maria was quite contemptuous ... "but," she added in another and fondly indulgent tone, "we had to let the Count, his people were starving, have a lot of that. We still get some income from it, but there are so many of us, and if Fanny should lose her nerve,"--Maria broke off; only she didn't use the ordinary word for "nerve" but the famous Vienna expression "Hamur," which means, beside nerve, a lot of things that are both more and less.

Tears overflowed her small, dark, friendly eyes. There was no nonsense about Maria. She adored Fanny, she was proud of Fanny and to have the revered aunt sitting there made a priceless occasion on which to relieve her feelings. Crossing her arms over her ample bosom she went on:

"She gives everything away, not only to the family and naturally to the Count, but yesterday--will you believe it,--to a shameless hussy, no better than she should be, she gave a heap of money to keep her out of the hospital, where she truly belongs. I told Fanny where I thought she'd end herself if she didn't look out, but Fanny" ... she broke off suddenly as the bedroom door opened.

"What are you gossiping about?" Fanny cried sharply to her, "Didn't you hear the door bell ring?" Then as it rang again a contraction passed over her face and she started to the door herself.

But Maria, in spite of her avoirdupois, was out like lightning. After a moment's parleying in the hall she was back.

"Nothing," she said looking fondly, relievèdly at Fanny, "It's only to say the carriage is there."

Fanny went slowly back into her room followed by Maria who shut the door. Frau Stacher left alone, almost immediately fell into a doze; her eyes closed heavily and she slipped deeply into the big chair. But she couldn't quite lose herself for she had a feeling that it would soon be time to go and kept trying to keep herself awake.

She sat up sharply, with a start, when Fanny reappeared, how long after she could not have told, in a black costume whose long, fur-trimmed cape fell smartly about her form. A tiny black velvet hat from which she had just torn the cunningly, expensively placed blue aigrette, put her eyes in a becoming, melancholy shadow. She had an extra pair of black gloves in her hand and a fine dark leather bag that she had done with, to replace the "horror" as she called it to herself that her aunt was using.

"You've got such dear little hands," she was saying as she held out the gloves, "These ar'n't big enough for me. I paid a heathen price for them, and this bag's a bit handier than yours." But in spite of her pleasant words, her pallor was so extreme as she held out the gloves and bag, that her aunt whose eyes were again very bright and not alone with fever, noted it anxiously.

"Oh, my little, little Fanny," she cried in quite a strong voice, and even held out her arms. She shared, in a way she could not have expressed, Fanny's grief whatever it was. She didn't want Fanny, dear, gold Fanny to suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ weep. She wanted to live a long, long time, even uncomfortably, denudedly, so that out of the whole careless world, Fanny might always have someone who truly loved her.

Then she became aware, for the first time, of something that intimately concerned herself. The shape and color of her own life.... Loving the children of three other women had been _her_ life. Her middle class life, undisturbing and for so long undisturbed. One day, one year, like another, always loving the children of three other women ... looking through the same windows at the same things. And suddenly now Fanny's world, Fanny's strange world.... It had other horizons, red horizons behind dark mountains with their secrets. But of these secrets her aunt was not thinking. She only knew, as she stood close to Fanny, that it was her own flesh and blood that was suffering,--beautiful and suffering.

How Fanny's beauty threw a bright, blinding cloud about everything that concerned her! She said again:

"My darling child, my beautiful child, don't weep," as Fanny pressed against her, and she comforted her as she might have done in the far off years for girlish griefs. Had she reflected she might have changed her old motto into "Beauty stays, Virtue goes."

She was breaking in Fanny's house for a last time her alabaster box of precious spikenard. From it, in the blue room, a strong fragrance came, over-powering the scent of lily of the valley from an expensive shop in the Graben that hung about Fanny's clothes, and the thin perfume of the too-early blossomed plant. She was thinking only of Fanny's generosity and why she could indulge those many generous impulses she thought not at all,--just as if the family didn't lower their voices when speaking of Fanny and look around to see that the children weren't there. She felt, too, intimately joined to Fanny. Deeply beneath consciousness was that feeling that Fanny was yet to give her something essential, had some ultimate gift for her, that she must be there to receive.... That it was to be her deathbed she didn't know. She only felt that something final and priceless would come through Fanny.

And truly 'tis a great thing to give any one. For mostly each one, no matter how he wanders or is denuded, has, in some strange way, his own.

* * * * *

They were driving slowly up over the noisy cobble stones of the Jacquingasse on their way to the cemetery, Kaethe and Fanny and Tante Ilde on the back seat of the big, black mourning coach. Kaethe, wedged between them, was holding on her lap the white wreath. Opposite sat the Professor. On his knees for a last time was Carli; Carli in his little white box; Carli on his first and only journey.

The sable horses struck the cobble stones with their slow, accustomed beat. It seemed to Frau Stacher the loudest sound she had ever heard, and "some day for you, some day for you" seemed cadenced unmistakably....

In the dark Minorite church Fanny had been a model of piety and recollection. She crossed herself so slowly, so devoutly. She buried her face in her hands and knelt long without fidgeting on the hard, uncomfortable stool. She took holy water and held a tip of her finger to Kaethe as they went out and then to Tante Ilde and to Leo. She and Kaethe had always loved each other very much. Fanny after her wont was going through the afternoon without stint or sloppiness. It would be, in her hands, an "entire" matter.

As they drove along Kaethe rested her head on her sister's warm, scented shoulder. Her eyes were dry, but her face was haggard from the night.

No one noticed that Tante Ilde didn't say a word. Kaethe and Leo were with their child a last time and Fanny, who generally selected pleasant things to do, was finding it more wearing than she had thought and was plunged in her own reflections. At one moment she said to herself "I'm not going to be able to stick it out," and forgot their griefs and miserably let her thoughts turn to the man she truly loved, and if everything in the world, every last thing, had been different.... Then suddenly she fell to cursing in her heart a certain predatory gentleman whom she had known in the "beginning," no, before the "beginning," but she pulled herself up round, that carriage was no place for curses, neither was it the moment. Then she caught sight of her face above Eberhardt's right shoulder. It was distinctly mirrored in the reflecting surface of the glass at his back, formed by the heavy black flaps of the driver's coat. It was white, white as the coffin on Eberhardt's lap, and the eyes were deep, dark pits, almost as if the flesh had fallen away from them. She was horribly frightened. What was the warm thing that went out of you and after it went out you were put in a box?... She jerked her head so that it slipped from view. But she got Tante Ilde's instead.... It was just dreadful.... All right as long as you lived, but there came a time when beauty, which had been so helpful, was clearly of no avail.... The activities of family and town were concentrated on getting you into a box and then ... Fanny who believed in hell and damnation, drew in her breath shudderingly. She was thankful to feel Kaethe's warm, living head against her shoulder. She wasn't dead yet--she was suddenly sure, too, that she'd have "time to repent." She quite brightened up, and as she never did anything by halves was apparently entirely herself by the time they got to the cemetery.

Fanny in the bosom of her family, for once taking charge of things in person, not just paying from a distance, was really worth seeing. Fanny at last visibly the source of whatever mercies they received. Fanny, as Pauli so truly called her, the family Doxology ... according to the mysterious permissions of God the source of their only blessings.

Fanny weeping and praying by the little grave, supporting the stricken mother--her sister, and laying on it the big wreath. Fanny taking them to the café near the cemetery and giving them hot coffee after their cold grief....

It was Fanny, too, who, when some extraordinarily stubbly semmels were served with it, bearing not the slightest resemblance to the anciently far-famed Viennese rolls, scolded the shambling, flat-footed waiter and said loudly it was a "shame" and "disgusting," and ended by going over to the desk and saying something in a lower tone to the gaunt woman who sat there. The woman had promptly produced some coffee cake and some crescents kept only for rich grief. She was used to pale, tear-washed faces. Every day, every day, they came in and went out. She had seen many a strange alteration in their looks after that hot coffee, even after ersatz coffee. People kept on living for all they had that momentary feeling that they couldn't. She had sat at that desk for twenty years. Grief, she knew it, all kinds, ... and they kept on living.

Even Kaethe, though her throat was stiff and dry with mother-grief, even Kaethe had taken her coffee.

But Tante Ilde made no pretense at drinking hers, not even a sip. Those little shivers had changed into a continuous trembling. She felt both hot and cold. Her eyes were filmy. The only thing she wanted to do really was to lie down, never to move again, to give way to that over-powering lassitude that she could no longer struggle against. She was only vaguely worried because she'd lost the new bag; dropped it at the grave probably, though when Eberhardt went back to get it, immediately when she noticed its loss, on coming out of the cemetery, it had already vanished from the earth. After her first dismay, she had strangely not cared, and now she was murmuring something about the alcove, not at all what any of the others were thinking or talking of.

Suddenly Kaethe, startled out of her own grief at a trembling motion of her aunt's shoulders, had looked at her in alarm.

"But what is the matter, Tante Ilde?" she asked.

"Why, she's really ill!" cried Fanny sharply, "we've got to get her home."

Her aunt hearing the word home muttered once more something about the alcove. Her face was ashen, but her pale, wide eyes shone strangely through the film that again threatened to veil them.

"We must go right away," Fanny cried and hastily paid for the coffee.

Her aunt didn't even hear her. All her strength was engaged in getting totteringly to the door, the professor's arm about her.

"I'm going to take her with me," Fanny whispered to Kaethe as they followed out to get into the coach.

Kaethe looked at her deeply, there was much love in her glance, but she only said:

"I don't think she likes it at Irma's. Irma's so fierce and she's so gentle."

"Sour stick," said Fanny as usual when referring to her step-mother. "I'll just keep her with me, for a day or two, till she's better," she continued thinking boldly, swiftly, "Maria can look after her."

It seemed suddenly the most natural thing in the world to have Tante Ilde with her for a day or two.

"Fanny, how good you are to us all," Kaethe whispered to her sister.

"Good--nothing!" said Fanny. But virtue was, all the same, its own quite sufficient reward at that moment, though she felt horribly self-reproachful at the thought that sometimes she'd let them go for months ... suppose they had all died!

Tante Ilde kept slipping down between her nieces in the carriage, though they were supporting her as well as they could. Her head was hanging over her breast. She wanted to sleep, even bumping along over those cobble stones. They all watched her anxiously. Once Fanny, her nerves quite on edge, leaned out of the window and screamed to the driver in a horrible voice that the others didn't recognize: "You, sheepshead! Get along!"

Then somewhat restored she drew her head in and after a few minutes, opening her immense gold bag gave Kaethe some money. No, Fanny wasn't doing things by halves that day.

"Get something nice for supper,--for the children," she added with sudden tears that were for the living children--no more for Carli who was really forever safe, though they seemed to have left him alone, in that chill Vienna earth, under that darkening January sky....

Frau Stacher scarcely knew how they got her upstairs. Only as from a great distance she heard Maria's "Jesus, Marie, Josef!" as they went in. She was beyond any more definite impression than that she had ceased to struggle. Fortitude, cruel virtue, were no longer demanded of her.

When she was gently laid on Fanny's bed she was conscious at first of its soft comfort under her aching body. They were taking off her clothes. She wished, but not anxiously, nor even ashamedly, that her chemise had not been so old or so grey from being always washed out in her little basin, but it didn't really matter she knew, and she quite forgot about it when something fresh and silken and scented took its place, lying smoothly against her back with its hot point of pain.

"Alcove," she continued to mutter from time to time between stertorous breathings.

"Why's she talking so much about an alcove?" whispered Fanny to Maria as they sat by the bed waiting for Hermann, whom Eberhardt was to get and send back in the mourning coach.

"It's where she sleeps at Frau Irma's,--a sort of alcove, off the living room. She's got her old brown divan in it, you remember in Baden, but she needs a room of her own. When you get old you need to have a door to close, and then Frau Irma is not always easy."

"Easy? A porcupine," Fanny whispered back and added something about Croatians in general not complimentary to that former Crownland. Then she looked restlessly at her watch.

"Why doesn't he come? Maria, I'm afraid," she ended with a break in her voice.

"It _is_ going badly with her," nervously admitted Maria, who had once been a great one at sick beds and who, when it was not so personal, loved to be in at a death.

Frau Stacher's breathing was indeed very noisy. It whistled through her thin chest, it came in gasps from her blue mouth.

"Do you think she's going to die?" cried Fanny suddenly in panic. "We'd better get a priest anyway, only the poor heathen die without one!"

Fanny had always been interested in foreign missions and was in the habit of giving propitiatory sums to the church when she got panicky, for the purpose of conversions....

A ring at the door, a firm, long ring caused Maria to jump up.

It was Hermann, Hermann of the old days, despite his right arm hanging straight, Hermann completely professional, quiet, strong, but loving too.

He gave one look at his Tante Ilde.

"Pneumonia," he said, "she's been ill for a couple of days," and he started to do the little there was to be done.

"But she never said anything except that she had a bit of a cold, the angel, and going to the cemetery too!" answered Fanny aghast.

"To the cemetery in such a state!" he echoed in astonishment, "why she won't get through the night. Fanny--I'm glad she's here."

As the brother and sister looked at each other their eyes filled with tears. The way life was....

"I'm afraid she's already begun her agony," he whispered a few minutes later, "dear, good, sweet Tante Ilde."

But he wrote a prescription for Maria to take out.

"It may last longer than we think. It's sometimes so hard for them to go, even when they've nothing to stay for, but we can try to make it easy for her."

Fanny ran out of the room after Maria.

"Go to the Kapuziners and bring some one back and quick," she whispered imperatively.

Then she returned to the bedside. Hermann was bending over his aunt, raising her up and Fanny ran again and got some of the softest cushions from the blue divan, to put high, high under her head.

Suddenly Tante Ilde opened her eyes.

"Manny, dear, good Manny!" she cried, quite loud, then, "Fanny, darling, you won't forget little Ferry?"

And then she called for Corinne, and called again and again. She loved them all equally, but the flavor of Corinne's being was the flavor of her own, Ildefonse Stacher's being, and that made a strange, an essential difference at the end....

But at that very minute Corinne was sitting in a little restaurant with Pauli, close together on a narrow, leather bench in a corner, and Pauli's dark, small hand lay closely, hotly over hers. After they had eaten he was going to take her to Kaethe's,--not to Fanny's where a more merciful Fate would have lead them. And that is why stupidly, horribly, Corinne was always to think, she wasn't at home when Maria came to get her....

As Tante Ilde lay calling for Corinne, with her blue eyes widely open, neither Fanny nor Hermann could know that flashingly, she was seeing, as the day before, Pauli's dark, turquoise-ringed hand clasped tightly over the slim whiteness of Corinne's, and that she was very frightened for Corinne. She closed her eyes flutteringly several times, but still she saw their hands. Then suddenly the cavities under her brow grew very deep and she gave a long, whistling gasp.

"Not yet," whispered Hermann, seizing Fanny's hand, for at the sight she had burst into wild weeping, "but soon,--dear, dear Auntie," and from his voice there was momentarily released all the pent-up tenderness of his great heart. It flooded the room. It surged warmly about his sister, about his dying aunt....

Then Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, began to pluck at the sheet and talk in snatches of Baden and of Heinie, her brother, their father. Once she smiled, but they didn't know that it was because the bed was so soft and she was so comfortable, quite knowing that she would never have to move again.... And certainly if this was dying it wasn't at all what people thought.

* * * * *

Maria's key was in the door ... Maria's voice was respectfully ushering someone into that silk-hung chamber,--a dark-bearded, deep-eyed Capuchin monk. He threw back widely his brown-hooded cloak, and as he did so glanced enfoldingly at the dying woman without a single other look about the room. His work lay there....

Frau Stacher had fallen into a last unconsciousness, but her breathing was still terribly loud, like wind through a vacant room. Fanny on her knees by the bed, was weeping and praying and kissing her aunt's thin hand rather extravagantly, after her way.

The monk's eyes, accustomed to the sight of death, knew without a word from Hermann that the end was very near. On the little, white, lace-covered table by the bed, on which Maria had placed a lighted candle, a basin of water and a towel, he laid the Blessed Oils, those final oils with which he was to anoint Frau Stacher's noisy tenement, commending it to mercy....

Her broad-lidded blue eyes, that through tears would look no more on misery, no more on starving children, no, never anymore....

Her ears, that would hear no further cries of woe, nor any unprofitable discourse....

Her nostrils, that would no more weakly dilate at smell of needed food....

Her tongue, that would frame no more its words of gentle, helpless pity....

Her hands, that had once given so freely, would be held out no more to receive. Never again would she have to suffer humble uncertainty for the gifts of food and raiment. The body, no longer needing food, was itself become as raiment, cast off....

Her feet, that had forever fallen away from the ranks of those who in aged misery still flitted through the wintry streets of Vienna seeking their midday meal of charity ... the Mariahilferstrasse, endless, the Alserstrasse separated from the Hoher Markt by so many wide, open places, the narrow, crowded Kaerntnerstrasse and all those other streets that had sounded a last time to her diminished step....

Irma would never again give her the thin part of the soup, and never again would she watch to see that her sister-in-law drew back the curtains of the alcove. Alcove! Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, in the name of Principalities and Powers, in the name of the Cherubim and Seraphim, was about to take possession of her whole heavenly mansion, her very own from all time unto all time, and big and beautiful.

* * * * *

Fanny not only buried her aunt decently, but splendidly as such things in such times were rated. A Requiem Mass was sung at the Capuchin Church. Expensive wreaths were ordered in the name of each niece for which Fanny herself paid; (except for Mizzi's, Mizzi got the bill, unjustly, she considered, and she ran into the office and said some horrible things to Hermann when it came)....

They were but more tokens of Fanny, those many flowers, Fanny inescapably, confusingly beneficent to the end. Wet with the dew of the Church's blessing, they almost concealed Tante Ilde's coffin, as to the sound of those sable horses over the cobbly streets she was carried to her grave ... at last to be alone behind the heaviest door known to mortals....

As they drove back, each was saying in one or another tone, "what a pity," that Tante Ilde couldn't have been there to enjoy it in her fine, gentle way, and that if they had known she was going to die so soon they would have arranged differently. They had spoken of Baden, too, and of childhood things. They had mourned, yes, but their mourning, as would have been any cheer, was after their several and varying natures.

Anna had not gone to Fanny's to see her aunt laid out. No, indeed! She and Hermine went only to the church and cemetery, as likewise did four of Kaethe's children and Irma and her boys. Hermine had been all eyes for her veiled, but still discernibly lovely aunt, whose crisp, deep black stood out cypress-like against the greyer, cheaper hues of the other mourning figures, and she had been pleasantly conscious of a sort of pricking interest in some one in her very own family who, by all accounts, would go straight to Hell when she died.

Ferry had wept over-much for his strength and years, but Resl in her high, true voice had sung "In Paradise, In Paradise" about the house for days.

Liesel, after a long discussion with Otto, who was born knowing what happened to husbands who didn't look after their wives, had gone, safely and properly accompanied by him, to take a last look at her aunt as she lay in Fanny's darkened salon, candles at her head and feet, and all those flowers,--in January. So great was the majesty clothing the features of "poor, old Tante Ilde," that fear suddenly entered into Liesel's rippling, shallow soul, and she got confused, and afterwards, to her annoyance, she could only remember vaguely that everything was blue and that over the divan was a silken cover picked out in what seemed to be silver rose-buds. Donkey that _she_ was, she hadn't noticed the jeweled elephants either, nor the rabbits of which she had heard so much. Otto couldn't help her out in the slightest,--no more than a blind man. No, Liesel decidedly hadn't had her pleasant wits about her that day and she keenly regretted not having taken better advantage of her one opportunity.

Fanny had not shown herself. Maria robed fittingly in deepest black, the expression on her face almost as sombre as her garb, saw through, competently and proudly, the visits of the sorrowing nieces.

Mizzi had been all honey, though she thought Fanny was decidedly over-doing things, and had given Maria a present of money, which Maria considered long due and took with small thanks. She couldn't abide Mizzi anyway.

Leo and Kaethe slipped in grievingly to continue their weeping by that second bier; Kaethe was greatly comforted by thinking that Carli and Tante Ilde were, even then, together.

Hermann came no more. Beloved dead,--he couldn't bear it--the cold body--and all he knew about it. No, no.

Corinne whose sorrow was as deep as her being, spent two nights watching by her Dresden china aunt, now done in palest ivory. She felt as if she herself had destroyed her. When you had a fragile treasure like that and threw it literally into the streets....

But Fanny mingled her bright tears so healingly with her sister's that the last night, as they sat near their Tante Ilde, they found themselves talking softly, smilingly even, of familiar little things that once had made her smile. The flickering light of the candles at her head and feet met the silver crucifix on her breast, shimmered on the silver hair flat above the still, pale forehead.... The same light caught with a greedy, leaping flame the young, living gold of the two bowed heads....

But after a while except for the memory of the splendid funeral Fanny gave her, getting dimmer even that, in the hearts of those she had truly loved, it would soon be to everyone except Tante Ilde herself, busied timelessly in one of many mansions, as if she had never been.