Erna's words flowed on, not unlike the object of the image in which she saw her life and love; and her voice, although pitched so low, had such a curiously intense ring, and her great eyes, which were opened wide, shone so strangely in the flickering light of the tall candles upon the dressing-table, that poor Agatha was almost beside herself with terror. Was Erna still aware of what she was saying? Was she raving? And, horrible to think of, could she be going mad?
"Erna! Erna!" she cried aloud, seizing and pressing both her hands. "Awake, awake! I have just been counting it up--when you are eight-and-thirty, like your mother now, he will be seventy--only he will never reach that age."
"I thought so!" she said. "As if time had anything to do with love! As if one year during which I can serve him, love him, did not outweigh a century! O Agatha, how meanly you think of love! And if he dies to-morrow, I'll die with him! There, that is the way I count, and I think it is simple and plain enough."
Despair lent Agatha courage enough to revert to the one point on which, as she had observed more than once during the last day or two, Erna was most sensitive.
"I will grant it all," she said. "I will believe all you assert about yourself, for I cannot read your heart. But Herr Bertram's heart is not your heart, and what is going on in his heart, Heaven only knows; you do not know it, at least he has never betrayed it to you by word or look. And I hold that he would have done so long ago if he loved you. What reasons should he have for hiding his love?"
"A thousand!" exclaimed Erna. "Or is it not a reason that he should have tortured himself for days with the idea that I might be fond of the Baron?"
"That idea he has assuredly given up ere this."
"For all that, he might tell you what he feels for you."
"And what if he doubts whether I love him?"
"Good Heavens, dearest! how can he doubt that?"
"He can indeed. During the first few days I was not clear about it myself. And when I was feeling that I loved him, I often was odd and capricious and defiant; and above all, when I discovered that the letter was missing from my blotting-book, and I hunted for it everywhere, and when suddenly it turned up again, having in the meantime passed through I do not know how many hands, and having very surely been read by mamma too--I was so indignant, I could see that he sometimes did not know what to think of me."