When they reached the house, the hall seemed to be full of people. The supper bell had lately rung, and the inmates, talking and laughing, were going into the dining-room. Dellwig, his hands full of papers, not having found Anna at home, was in the act of making elaborate farewell bows to the assembled ladies. After the two silent hours of suffering that lay between herself and Axel, how strange it was, this noisy bustle of daily life. She caught fragments of what they were saying, fragments of the usual prattle, the same nothings that they said every day, accompanied by the same vague laughs. How strange it was, and how awful, the tremendousness of life, the nearness of death, the absolute relentlessness of suffering, and all the prattle. "_Um Gottes Willen!_" shrieked Frau von Treumann, when she caught sight of this white image of grief set suddenly in their midst. "It has smashed up, then, your bank?" And she made a hasty movement towards the hall table, on which lay a letter for Anna from Karlchen, containing, as she knew, an offer of marriage. Anna turned with a blind sort of movement, and stretched out her hand for Letty, drawing her to her side, instinctively seeking any comfort, any support; and she stood a moment clinging to her, gazing at the little crowd with sombre, unseeing eyes. "What has happened, Anna?" asked the princess uneasily. "You must congratulate me," said Anna slowly in German, her head held very high, her face of a deathly whiteness. A lightening look of comprehension flashed into Dellwig's eyes; he scarcely needed to hear the words that came next. "Herr von Lohm and I were to-day," she said. Then she looked round at them with a vague, piteous look, and put her hand up to her throat. "We shall be married--we shall be married--when--when it pleases God." CONCLUSION The moral of this story, as Manske, wise after the event, pointed out when relating those parts of it that he knew on winter evenings to a dear friend, plainly is that all females--_alle Weiber_--are best married. "Their aspirations," he said, "may be high enough to do credit to the noblest male spirit; indeed, our gracious lady's aspirations were nobility itself. But the flesh of females is very weak. It cannot stand alone. It cannot realise the aspirations formed by its own spirit. It requires constant guidance. It is an excellent material, but it is only material in the raw." "What?" cried his wife. "Peace, woman. I say it is only material in the raw. And it is never of any practical use till the hand of the master has moulded it into shape." "_Sehr richtig_," agreed the friend; with the more heartiness that he was conscious of a wife at home who had successfully withstood moulding during a married life of twenty years. "That," said Manske, "is the most obvious moral. But there is yet another."