With these words she arose and left the room. Helena cast a tearful look towards heaven. "Leuchtenberg is right," she thought; "Johanna is haughty, obstinate, and heartless. I shall be spared a thousand annoyances by her leaving me. I am only sorry for Lisbeth's sake. The dear little creature really loves her sister, and Johanna seemed to care for her. But it is plain now how much her affection was worth!" Johanna passed a sleepless night, but when morning came her mind was made up; she arose and wrote immediately to Dönninghausen and to Lindenbad. Her last letter was to Ludwig, and was as follows: "I have just thanked your father and Mathilde for the help they offered me, and have told them that I cannot accept it. Little as my father seemed to care for me, he always provided for me with a lavish hand; but he has left nothing, and it seems very unjust to burden your father with my maintenance when my grandfather offers me a home beneath his roof. "This reason, however, excellent as it is, is not my only one. You offer to leave your father's house if I come to it. That alone would deter me. Finally,--you know I am given to selfishness--I dread living with Mathilde. No one knows better than I how excellent she is, how dutiful, self-sacrificing, and unpretending. But she is strict and literal to a degree that paralyzes and irritates me. Your mother, from whom Mathilde inherits all her good qualities, was, besides, kind and imaginative. Hers was the heart of a child so long as she lived. Your home without her--and, let me add, without you--could never be mine; and, since I resign it, I may as well go among entire strangers. "If you would lighten my task, my dear Ludwig, remain the connecting link between my past and present. Let me inform you as to my life, and let me hear from you of your work, your plans for the future. However dissatisfied you may be with what I am now, it cannot affect the past,--I mean our childhood. Do you not remember how I always from the first sought and found protection with you from Mathilde's tyranny? It must always be so; a kind of instinct will always lead me to you whenever I need counsel and help, and I know that you will open to me when I knock. "I have told my grandfather, who wrote to me a few days ago, that I am ready to go to him, and that I only wait for his directions with regard to my journey. To part from what is dear to me here--my father's grave and my little sister--will be hard; and, besides, I liked the atmosphere in which I lived. Not for the sake of society here; I knew no one intimately but my father and Lisbeth. But all this activity and effort in the interest of art, inartistic as its results sometimes might be, interested me, and gave me the sensation of being in my element.