"You'll _starve_ together!" she said viciously.
For a moment the two men remained in an embarrassed silence. Young Vanderlyn, with downcast eyes, was feeling greater mortification than he ever in his life had known before. Just then the loss of millions did not matter to him--what really distressed him was that his mother should make such an exhibition of cold-hearted snobbery before the father of the girl he loved.
"That wouldn't matter, mother, in the least," he said, at length. "Money! Do you think it possible that it would sway me? We won't starve together--quite. I'm strong--I am a man and I can do a man's work in the world. But you--remember, mother, you will have to take your choice between receiving Anna--and myself--together--or of being left alone."
Without another word he left the room--left it with an old man's dimmed and misty eyes agaze upon him, full of love and admiration.
Mrs. Vanderlyn rose, too, beside herself with shame and grief and indignation. She turned upon the flute-player.
"Alone!" she cried. "Did you hear that? Oh, the ingratitude, the selfishness, of children!"
"Madame," said Herr Kreutzer gravely, "do you not think he has a right to his own life--his happiness?"
"His happiness!" A rasping scorn was in the voice of the unhappy woman. "Nobody thinks of mine! He is my only son. He knows quite well that I can't live without him--that I could not give him up!"
Kreutzer smiled--not with an air of triumph--the discomfiture of the unhappy woman did not make him feel the least exultant. It was pure happiness that made him smile--joy to think that Anna's wedding would not, after all, be shadowed by her husband's sorrow for the loss of mother-love.
"Then Madame will yield?" he cried. "Madame will make the dear young people happy?"
"Upon one condition. Positively only upon one condition."
"She is wonderfully well-bred--I do not understand it. I could pass her, anywhere, for a distinguished foreigner--a foreigner of noble birth."
The father of the subject of her praise smiled gravely. "That is very true. She will--what you call it?--look the part."
"But to be quite frank," the lady went on "you, yourself, are quite impossible, Herr Kreutzer. Quite impossible, I must assure you."