Thus too she passed the day that came and the night that followed the day. She knew that disease was burrowing in her body. She had expected it to show; but when it came, it was not with sudden violence but with treacherous sloth. One part of her after another was affected, and at last she could move freely no longer. She knew, too, that it was no ordinary indisposition from which one recovers within a few days. She felt it to be a process as of ripening which brings a fruit to its fall, as a concentration of the hostile forces that had before been scattered in effectiveness and in time. The life she had lived demanded a reckoning. The physician in the Hamburg hospital had foretold it all months before; now the time had come. She was very undemonstrative about her condition. She lay quietly in bed. She suffered no pain, and had but little fever. Lying still there did not make her impatient. She was glad of the necessity; there was no better way of guarding the pearls. People might come and go. She had her treasure next her body, beside her very breast. She was sure of it at every moment and with every movement, and no one was the wiser. She pictured to herself what they would say and do, if she were to show them her secret treasure, if she were to call in one of those who all unconsciously passed her door or climbed the rickety stairs, or some one from the street or the tavern or the grog-shop--a poor fellow who had slaved all week, or a woman who sold her body for three marks, or another who had seven children to feed. In concentrated triumph she looked through the window at the rows of windows across the street. There lived the others whom misery throttled and in whom suffering whined. Like ants they crept about in the tall houses from cellar to garret, and had no suspicion of Karen’s pearls. Karen’s pearls! How that sounded and sang and glowed and glimmered--Karen’s pearls.... At last the secrecy became a burden. She did not enjoy her great possession as she would have done, had but one other shared the knowledge of it. She needed at least one other pair of eyes. She thought of Isolde Schirmacher, but the girl was too talkative and too stupid. She thought of the wife of Gisevius, of a seamstress on the fourth floor, of the huckstress in the street, of Amadeus Voss. At last she hit upon Ruth Hofmann. The girl seemed the least harmful of all, and she determined to show her the pearls. Under the pretext of asking the girl to fetch her something from the apothecary’s, she sent a message to the Hofmanns, and Ruth came in. Karen waited until Isolde had left the room; then she sat up and asked the girl to lock the door. Then she said: “Come here!” She turned the coverlet aside, and there lay the great heap of pearls upon the linen. “Look at that,” she said. “Those are real pearls, and they’re mine. But if you mention it to anybody, God help you, or my name ain’t Karen Engelschall.”