"Oh, that is not so bad. Hecht is certainly the best tailor in the city." A shade of bitter feeling passed across his wife's face and she could not refrain from saying, "When I recollect that you lately refused to let me have the shawl I so needed, that did not cost half so much, and----" "The money for your dress all goes to the apothecary, my dear," Herbert replied, with a sneer. "My dress!" his wife repeated,--"you would be ashamed to walk in the street with me,--my clothes are so shabby." "No one expects much elegance from an invalid whose illness costs her husband so much money." Frau Herbert cast a glance at her husband, but she said not a word more. For one moment she leaned her weary head against the back of her chair, but the position was too uncomfortable, and she resumed her work, thinking with pain how the physician had imperatively recommended her to procure a more comfortable chair, in which she could sleep sitting up,--but now this small luxury, as well as all the rest, had been denied her! Suddenly the door opened, and in rustled and fluttered a creature half child, half old maid,--half butterfly, half bat. Around her head floated a mass of very light curls. A _nez retroussé_ gave to her face a naïve air of youthfulness, which, however, the crafty, eager expression of her small eyes contradicted. Just so her teeth, short and wide apart, resembled those of a young child who has shed his first set, while the wrinkles about her thin, open lips indicated an age of thirty years at least. The figure, crowned by this strange head with its huge mane of curls, was delicate and slender as that of a half-grown girl. Her hands were small, but wrinkled like those of an old woman. She was dressed in thin, flowing garments,--her round straw hat was adorned by long, light-brown ribbons. Her gait, bearing, and address were light, airy, sylph-like. It was evident at the first glance that she was a creature who believed herself highly poetic, richly gifted, breathing a charmed atmosphere, and that although she might in reality be thirty years old she had in imagination never passed sweet sixteen. Such a creature is only conceivable with a sheet of music or a sketch-book in her hand; and, in obedience to a mysterious law of nature, this too was not wanting in the present instance. "Brother, darling!" she cried, skipping up to Herbert, "how charming you are in your new coat! Aha, are you going to the Möllner's reception this evening? Yes!" Trilling a little air, she laid aside her book, hat, and gloves. "Tra-la-la-la--oh, I am so happy to-day I cannot talk, I can only sing." And she hummed the refrain of the charming song by Taubert, "I know not why, but sing I must!" Then she remembered that she had not yet spoken to her brother's wife. "Oh, dear Ulrika, forgive me for not asking how you are. No better yet? Ah! your little Elsa is so agitated to-day! I feel--I can't tell how--my bosom heaves and