"To my father's house?" she interrupted him, and her eyes flashed. "Let me tell you how it happened," she went on more gently, "and you will easily comprehend." They stood leaning against the balustrade of the balcony. The shady little garden beneath them, the golden light of evening streaming from the western sky awakened the same memory in each, but Johanna alone gave it utterance. "Do you remember," she asked, "how we stood at your garden wicket the evening before you left Lindenbad and watched the setting sun? It was not quite two years ago, and yet how much has happened since then! you have made a home both in Paris and in London." "A home!" he interrupted her; "no, Johanna, not for a moment. I worked hard in London and Paris, I studied day and night, looking neither to the right nor to the left, for I had but one aim, one desire,--to return to my home well skilled in my profession. I may have become a skilful physician, but my home is desolate,--my mother dead,--you here." "Your dear mother!" Johanna whispered, and her eyes filled with tears. He did not see them. "If I had been at home you should not have gone," he went on; "but my father has grown to be a weak old man, and my mother was enfeebled by illness before her death, or she would have kept her promise better." "Do you mean the promise that she made to my dying mother?" Johanna asked. "She kept that perfectly." "She let you come here to this step-mother!" Ludwig exclaimed, and his lips quivered, as they always did when he controlled his indignation. "She could not but let me; I wanted to come, and my father wanted me again." "So suddenly?" Ludwig interposed. "Since your mother's death he had not apparently given you a thought. My father's house was your home, your holidays were spent with us, you came to us when you left boarding-school; you belong to us, and to us only! Your father has his fame, his luxury, his wife, the woman who was your mother's death----" "Ludwig!" Johanna interrupted him reprovingly. He coloured. "It is the truth, and you are old enough to know it," he said, sullenly. "You do know it, but would not for worlds acknowledge it! Deceit--falsehood--hypocrisy everywhere. In your case I suppose it would be called filial piety." He threw himself into the nearest chair and frowned darkly. "Hard and unjust as ever," Johanna exclaimed, and her voice trembled. "As ever?" he repeated. "You forget: formerly you trusted to my judgment, you saw with my eyes and followed willingly where I led." "Possibly," said Johanna; "but since then I have learned to see with my own eyes, and to walk alone. It was high time: I am no longer a child." She was right; Ludwig reflected that she must be nearly twenty years old, although she looked scarcely sixteen, so immature was her slender figure, so youthful the pale face that looked dreamily into the world from beneath a luxuriance of brown braids.