Karl Schommer was universally held to be a hard, cold, stern man, capable of only one passion--avarice. One woman, she to whom he had given his whole heart, knew what he really was. For her sake, to win for his wife the daughter of his wealthy, purse-proud employer, Schommer had laboured with superhuman energy, and embarked his first accumulated earnings in speculation. Everything that he attempted succeeded. He won wealth, and with wealth the woman whom he loved. Her death was a terrible blow; it would have crushed him had he not been sustained by a sense of duty. He had a sacred charge to fulfil in care for the little motherless daughter whom his dying wife had put into his arms with her last loving smile. To little Eva he henceforth devoted himself with all the unselfish tenderness which he had shown to his early-lost wife. For her he continued to labour with the same restless energy and with the same success as heretofore. The child needed a woman's care; the anxious father would not entrust it to a hired nurse, but he bethought himself of his sister-in-law, the wife of his brother Balthasar, and he begged her to take charge of his motherless little one. It was no easy matter for Aunt Minni to make up her mind to leave beautiful Dresden, where she kept a thriving haberdasher's shop; but persuaded thereto by her kindly husband, who loved his brother dearly, she did leave it and undertake to preside over her brother-in-law's household and to take charge of little Eva. Karl Schommer could not have provided better for his child's physical welfare than by summoning his sister-in-law to his aid. Never was there a more devoted aunt and nurse, and she was rewarded by seeing her charge develop into a strong, healthy child. It was decidedly questionable however whether Aunt Minni's capacity for undertaking Eva's mental culture were equally good; but of this Karl Schommer thought not at all. His own education was very defective; it never troubled him that his brother and his brother's wife were alike uncultivated; it was enough for him that they loved his child almost as tenderly as he did himself. There could hardly have been worse training for a child than that under which the little Eva grew up, and but for her admirable natural endowments of disposition and intellect, she must have been entirely ruined by the constant and injudicious indulgence with which she was treated. She was still very young when her father died; her home-education was after this neither better nor worse than it had been before. She tyrannized over the entire household, over her teachers and schoolmates. Only one of these last would not bend before her: this was Aline, her present companion.