By five the struggle was at its height. The Frau Consul, erect in convulsions, with staring eyes, thrust wildly about her with her arms as though trying to clutch after some support or to reach the hands which she felt stretching toward her. She was answering constantly in every direction to voices which she alone heard, and which evidently became more numerous and urgent. Not only her dead husband and daughter, but her parents, parents-in-law, and other relatives who had passed before her into death, seemed to summon her; and she called them all by name--though the names were some of them not familiar to her children. “Yes,” she cried, “yes, I am coming now--at once--a moment--I cannot--oh, let me sleep!” At half-past five there was a moment of quiet. And then over her aged and distorted features there passed a look of ineffable joy, a profound and quivering tenderness; like lightning she stretched up her arms and cried out, with an immediate suddenness swift as a blow, so that one felt there was not a second’s space between what she heard and what she answered, with an expression of absolute submission and a boundless and fervid devotion: “Here I am!” and parted. They were all amazed. What was it? Who had called her? To whose summons had she responded thus instantly? Some one drew back the curtains and put out the candles, and Dr. Grabow gently closed the eyes of the dead. They all shivered in the autumn dawn that filled the room with its sallow light. Sister Leandra covered the mirror of the toilet table with a cloth. CHAPTER II Through the open door Frau Permaneder could be seen praying in the chamber of death. She knelt there alone, at a chair near the bed, with her mourning garments flowing about her on the floor. While she prayed, her hands folded before her on the seat of the chair, she could hear her brother and sister-in-law in the breakfast-room, where they stood and waited for the prayer to come to an end. But she did not hurry on that account. She finished, coughed her usual little dry cough, gathered her gown about her, and rose from the chair, then moved toward her relatives with a perfectly dignified bearing in which there was no trace of confusion. “Thomas,” she said, with a note of asperity in her voice, “it strikes me, that as far as Severin is concerned, our blessed mother was cherishing a viper in her bosom.” “What makes you think that?” “I am perfectly furious with her. I shall try to behave with dignity, but--has the woman any right to disturb us at this solemn moment by her common ways?” “What has she been doing?”