"You will not complain of me for a similar cause," the young girl now said, her voice trembling with suppressed excitement, while her eyes sparkled with a strange light. "My case is exactly the reverse of that young lady's. So long as my mother taught me, all study was a pleasure. She did not make it easy; I was compelled to study out everything by myself, and I never dared to repeat anything by rote, for she chided me when she discovered it. Perhaps I did not learn much, or a great variety; but everything made a strong impression upon me, and I have not forgotten a word. But she died when I was yet very young, and afterwards when I tried to get on by myself with the aid of books everything seemed uninteresting, and I no longer took any pleasure in study. And besides all this I must hasten to confess, Herr Doctor, that, after all, you may not expect too much, that I have an actual aversion to history and geography, and no ability to remember them. On the contrary--but you are smiling. I expected as much; you did not suppose it was so bad." "And for what have you a taste, Fräulein? What is it you desire to learn? Do not take offence at my smile. It only meant, that, at your age, I was not very unlike you." She made no reply but cast a timid glance at her father. The little man seemed to understand it. He went to the other window, and busied himself with his bits of wood. "I should like," she now said in an undertone, fixing her dark eyes on the flowers in the vase, "I should like to have a clear idea of many things which are now dark to my mind. Often when I am sitting quietly at work, thoughts come that frighten me. Then they vanish again, because I cannot detain and think them out. It is like being at night in a strange neighborhood during a thunder-storm; for an instant a flash of lightning reveals streets and alleys, and then, suddenly, all is dark again. Or perhaps I read a passage in a book, over which I am constantly compelled to reflect, longing to ask the author what he meant, but no answer comes. I feel," she added in a still lower tone, "that in many things I am unlike my dear father and a friend of ours, the Fran Professorin Valentin, who is half a theologian, while I--well it is not for lack of good will if I am not like her. But what I do not understand has no existence for me, at least to contemplate it makes me unhappy rather than happy, and yet when they say that the final secrets of the world, and the divine thoughts, cannot be comprehended by the human mind, I am obliged to concede the point. Only I can have no rest until I learn whether we can know _anything_, and if so how much, or if one, who unfortunately is unable to believe what she cannot understand, must renounce all truth." She stopped suddenly, as her father made a movement as if to rejoin them, and with a hasty beseeching glance at Edwin, seemed to entreat him not to violate the secret of the confessional.