Late at night, sitting by the open window, from where she could see his domicile, she caught herself humming,
"'T is said that absence conquers love, But, oh! believe it not."
And she stopped. She _was_ thinking of Rudolph. Yes, but she had fancied at first that she was "singing out of his father's heart," not her own. Poor Rudolph! Now she knew what had exiled him from his father's home, and she, alas! had driven him from the new home he had meant to build for himself. And she had thought herself right. A bankrupt suicide's daughter, how could she, a German, with all the deep religious prejudices of that people burnt into her soul, dream of becoming anything more than a friend to the man she honored above all others?
People said she had led him on, had jilted him, and he had left the country. Could she recall him? And how? Yet she could not leave this lonely old man to die, as he was surely dying, of the remorse in his heart and the bitter regrets for his injustice to his son.
No one, coming upon the family at the Lone Linden the very day after their advent to the place, would have suspected them of being strangers there. It was home to them at once. The garden, with its "two ornamental palms," as Christine called them, its wealth of flowers and sparkling fountain, lay all day in the laughing sunshine, and the beams that crept in through the bay-window of the sitting-room played hide-and-seek amid the ivy trailing its glossy leaves across the opposite wall. It was here that Christine's piano stood, and as Miss Barbara always sought the more gayly-furnished parlor as soon as her music-lesson was ended, so Clara learned to despise that apartment, and spend much of her time in this room.
Toward sunset, when shadows grew heavier, and the evening breeze shook the foliage, the broken mound with its single tree had always a dreary look about it, and even Clara was moved into saying, "If Mr. Muldweber should die, I would not dare come to this tree in the evening sun--it would be haunted, I know. I should see the old gentleman or his wraith standing there with his arm around the tree, and his other hand shading his eye. How lonely he looks; is he waiting for any one, I wonder?"