Her reputation for worldly astuteness surpassed that of
any other old woman in Europe, though it was, perhaps, not altogether
deserved. Forty years before, she had been a healthy and happy girl,
whose experience of the world had been confined to the family estate
near Gemuenden. And the estate was a small one, for the family, though of
blood the bluest, was very poor.
One tragedy had marked her early girlhood. She was curled up, one
evening, in the window-seat at the stairhead watching the moon rise over
the great trees of the park, when she heard loud voices in the hall
below, and peeping down, saw her father strike another man heavily
across the mouth. A sudden silence fell, and she stole away frightened
to her bed, where she sobbed herself to sleep. In the gray of the
morning, her mother had awakened her, had carried her to a window, and
knelt with her there, staring out toward the park and calling upon God
to have mercy. Through the streaming mist, there came presently toward
them two dim figures, carrying a third--what need to go on? After that,
the house became a cloister.
It chanced, one day when she was nearly twenty, that the eye of her
cousin of Markheim fell upon her. He had never married; he had been too
busy with his pleasures. But he had arrived at an age when it was
necessary to think of an heir; at an age, too, when the uneasy
consciousness began to grow within him that if he desired an heir, there
was no time to be lost.
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