She dressed herself hastily, and prepared some coffee, of which she induced Sara to partake. The day dragged on. No one came near. Even Falkenberg failed in his usual call. Sara said nothing to Ellen of any suffering she endured. The woman could only guess from the utter transformation of her usual ways and habits that she was enduring tortures, and her own pain and perplexity increased. Once Sara went to her studio, and began to paint; but in a moment she flung down brush and palette, and began to pace about the bare boards, restlessly. She did not resume the effort: it had been in the first instance mechanical. The day appeared like a week to Ellen. It was November, when the daylight soon faded. The weather was cold; there was a foretaste already of a biting winter, in a sharp, black frost, and a leaden sky, which caused the day to close in even earlier than usual. It was evening. Sara had taken up a book, and was gazing unseeingly at the page, and turning over the leaves restlessly. Suddenly she closed the book, and said: ‘Is not this Wednesday, Ellen?’ ‘Yes, Miss Sara, it is.’ ‘It is Frau Wilhelmi’s evening at home. I shall go. And if I do, it is time to get ready at once. Will you just go and get my dress?’ ‘Miss Ford! you are not fit to go out,’ exclaimed Ellen, desperation lending boldness to her. Sara looked at her, and repeated her order. Ellen, in distress, asked which dress she would wear. ‘Oh, any. The old black velvet–that will be best, for it is cold.’ Ellen was perforce obliged to go and get out the dress, and help Sara to make her toilette, feeling all the time that it was as if she attired a ghost. When she was ready the young lady looked beautiful, as usual, but it was with a kind of beauty which no sane person cares to see. Face and lips were ghastly white; there was a deathlike composure and calm in her expression; only those beautiful eyes looked restlessly forth, dark and clouded, and full of a misery which surpassed the power of words to utter, or tears to alleviate. Sara hardly knew herself why she was going out; there was a vague consciousness that her own thoughts and the horrible suffering they brought with them were becoming rapidly intolerable; that soon, if she did not see and speak to some other beings, she would shriek aloud, or lose her reason, or that something terrible would happen. She looked at herself in the glass, and Ellen suggested that she wanted a little rouge. ‘Rouge!’ repeated Sara, laughing drily; ‘why, I am in a fever. Feel my hand!’ Ellen took it, and incidentally felt as well, while her finger rested on Miss Ford’s wrist, that her pulse was beating with an abnormal rapidity. But the hand was burning as she had said. With a dark foreboding of evil, Ellen threw a cloak around the girl’s shoulders, and put on her own shawl and bonnet to accompany her, for the Wilhelmi’s house was hard by, and at Elberthal it was the custom to walk to every kind of entertainment.