"Young, with blue eyes?" interrupted the sculptor, with difficulty unclinching his teeth.
No. An elderly lady, not far from fifty, dressed in black and heavily veiled. She asked for Frances, and said she was to bring her to Fräulein Julie, only for half an hour. It was a surprise they were preparing for the father, she said; Fräulein Angelica was going to make a sketch of the child; a drosky was waiting outside the door, and she asked the good grandmamma to put on the child's little cloak, but not to make any other change in its dress. The old woman, as soon as her deafness allowed her to catch the meaning of this story, had thought it rather strange, at first; but the explanation given by the stranger that Fräulein Angelica was prevented from coming and getting the child herself, by a slight cold she had caught on the evening before, had quieted her again. Besides, the child would be brought back in a couple of hours; Fräulein Julie would bring it home herself. As the stranger seemed to be so well acquainted with all the people and circumstances of which she spoke, the old woman could offer no reasonable objection. But the stranger had scarcely left the house when she was filled with an unaccountable anxiety, and had impatiently awaited her daughter's return.
She, however, had been detained in the city longer than she had expected by a number of errands; and, when she finally did return and found that the child had not been brought back, she immediately set out in the greatest anxiety to look for it. But she found no trace either at Julie's (who was herself absent, the old servant Erich said, for she had not come back to her dinner at the usual time), or at Angelica's house. At the latter place they told her that the artist had not gone out until about noon, for she had risen very late; besides, she had found the weather too dark for working. Her last faint hope had been that the child would be found at her father's--and here, too, there was no trace of her!
The woman's eyes filled with tears while telling him the story. She had slipped down from the pedestal and now lay, weeping bitterly, at the feet of the silent man, as if she would disarm his anger by this humble posture.