That was the first long separation, for almost twelve hours.  Poor Effi!  How was she to pass the evening?  To go to bed early would be inadvisable, for she would wake up and not be able to go to sleep again, and would listen for every sound.  No, it would be best to wait till she was very tired and then enjoy a sound sleep.  She wrote a letter to her mother and then went to see Mrs. Kruse, whose condition aroused her sympathy.  This poor woman had the habit of sitting till late at night with the black chicken in her lap.  The friendliness the visit was meant to show was by no means returned by Mrs. Kruse, who sat in her overheated room quietly brooding away the time.  So when Effi perceived that her coming was felt as a disturbance rather than a pleasure she went away, staying merely long enough to ask whether there was anything the invalid would like to have.  But all offers of assistance were declined.

Meanwhile it had become evening and the lamp was already burning.  Effi walked over to the window of her room and looked out at the grove, whose trees were covered with glistening snow.  She was completely absorbed in the picture and took no notice of what was going on behind her in the room.  When she turned around she observed that Frederick had quietly put the coffee tray on the table before the sofa and set a place for her.  “Why, yes, supper.  I must sit down, I suppose.”  But she could not make herself eat.  So she got up from the table and reread the letter she had written to her mother.  If she had had a feeling of loneliness before, it was doubly intense now.  What would she not have given if the two sandy-haired Jahnkes had just stepped in, or even Hulda?  The latter, to be sure, was always so sentimental and as a usual thing occupied solely with her own triumphs.  But doubtful and insecure as these triumphs were, nevertheless Effi would be very happy to be told about them at this moment.  Finally she opened the grand piano to play some music, but she could not play.  “No, this will make me hopelessly melancholy; I will read, rather.”  She looked for a book, and the first to fall into her hands was a thick red tourist’s handbook, an old edition, perhaps from the days when Innstetten was a lieutenant.  “Yes, I will read in this book; there is nothing more quieting than books like this.  Only the maps should always be avoided.  But I shall guard against this source of sand in the eyes, which I hate.”

She opened the book at random at page 153.  In the adjoining room she heard the tick-tock of the clock, and out of doors Rollo, who at nightfall had left his place in the shed, as was his custom every evening, and had stretched himself out on the large woven mat just outside the bedroom door.  The consciousness that he was near at hand decreased Effi’s feeling that she was forsaken.  In fact, it almost put her in a cheerful mood, and so she began, without further delay, to read.  On the page lying open before her there was something about the “Hermitage,”