But they seemed to her tired body to live, those nieces of hers, at the ultimate points of the Viennese compass. Her feet and back ached at the bare thought of those endless, cobbly streets, windswept, wet by rain and snow. All roads led to Calvary. Those once charming streets of the Imperial City were now but so many ways to the hill of charity, and it was a hill that old age crept up timidly, anxiously. The cross was so surely at the top.... Then she bethought herself how the days of the week came only one at a time, the way after all that life was tempered to mortality, one day, one thing at a time.... But it wasn't only troubles of food and raiment, of shelter; Frau Stacher had grave theological difficulties as well, encrusted confusingly about the admonition: "Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat or for your body what you shall put on ... for your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." No, she had no slightest understanding; and faith was but the dimmest of night-lights, flickering so uncertainly that the dark masses of her difficulties alone were apparent. She seemed to be caught terrifyingly between her needs reduced though they were, really only a bed and enough food to keep her alive, and the Divine withholding of those things. No, she couldn't understand, and all through that last long night at Frau Kerzl's she hung shiveringly over the dim puzzle of her life, which once had fallen so easily into its bright and pleasant pattern.... For the dozenth time she pulled the little, hard, square feather-bed, disdained of the Englishman, about her shoulders and drew her knees up under it. At last out of her chill bewilderment she began to think of Kaethe, of taking her the Thursday dinner, of what she could get, in a world now filled mostly, it seemed, with inedible substances. The thought of giving, even vicariously, lighted in her a glowing eagerness. She found herself suddenly quite warm, even to her ankles and feet, and as the late January light began to filter in through the cracks of the brown rep curtains she fell, mercifully, into a deep slumber. II LIESEL AND OTTO _Allegretto amoroso._ Sorgen sind für Morgen gut. When belated and hurriedly Frau Stacher finally got away from Frau Kerzl's, it was somewhat as a little war-bark after its time is up, leaves an unpleasant port, but still a port, and puts out to sea in sure signs of rough weather.