"Oh, Erika!--dearer than you!" The old lady rises and strokes the girl's arm tenderly. "I am often sorry that I cannot love you both together!" she adds, half timidly, in an undertone.
But this time Erika repulses almost angrily the caress usually so dear to her. "I cannot understand you!" she says: "it is a positive mania of yours. You are always reproaching me for not having married Goswyn, or hinting that I ought to marry him,--a man who has not wasted a thought upon me for years!"
"Oh, Erika! how can you talk so? Remember Bayreuth."
"What if I do remember Bayreuth? Yes, he still thought of me then; that is, he remembered the young girl with whom he had ridden in the Thiergarten, and he brought her memory with him to Bayreuth; but he discovered it did not fit with what he found there: that was the end of it all!" Erika silently paces the room to and fro once or twice, then, pausing before her grandmother, she continues: "It stings me whenever you speak of Goswyn and lose yourself in the contemplation of his measureless magnanimity. Magnanimity! Yes, but it is a cold, sterile, arrogant magnanimity! He is a thoroughly just man, but he is a man who never forgives a weakness, because none ever beset him,--none, at least, of which he is conscious. He---- Oh, yes----,"--the girl's voice grows hoarse, she catches her breath and goes on with increasing volubility,--"I have no doubt that he would spring into the water at any moment to save the life, at the risk of his own, of any worthless wretch, but as soon as he brought him to land he would turn his back upon him and march away with his head proudly erect, without even casting a look upon the man he had rescued, let alone giving him a kind word. Witness his behaviour towards me. I refer to it expressly that we may correct once for all your painful and humiliating misapprehension. He did, as you know, do me a service in Bayreuth which I could not have expected of any one else. Granted. But he has never forgiven me for being betrothed for six or eight weeks to Lord Langley. Good heavens! it was a mistake of mine, a stupidity, the result of vanity and ambition on my part. But it was nothing more; and yet it was enough to cause--to cause Herr von Sydow to banish me from grace forever. This is your wonderful Goswyn. It is a matter of perfect indifference to me: I take not the slightest interest in him, thank God! If I had been interested in him I might have fretted myself nearly to death; but, as it is, I am merely vexed that I should have overrated him,--that is all."