“Dear Mr. Bopp, I wish I could heal this sorrow, but as I cannot, let me bear it with you; let me tell you how we loved the little child, and longed to see her; how we should have rejoiced to know you had so dear a friend to make your life happy in this strange land; how we shall grieve for your great loss, and long to prove our respect and love for you.  I cannot say this as I ought, but, oh, be comforted, for you will see the child again, and, remembering that she waits for you, you will be glad to go when God calls you to meet your Ulla in that other Fatherland.”

“Ah, I will go now!  I haf no wish to stay, for all my life is black to me.  If I had found that other little friend to fill her place, I should not grieve so much, because she is weller there above than I could make her here; but no; I wait for that other one; I save all my heart for her; I send it, but it comes back to me; then I know my hope is dead, and I am all alone in the strange land.”

There was neither bitterness nor reproach in these broken words, only a patient sorrow, a regretful pain, as if he saw the two lost loves before him and uttered over them an irrepressible lament.  It was too much for Dolly and with sudden resolution she spoke out fast and low,—­

“Mr. Bopp, that was a mistake.  It was not I you saw at the masque; it was Dick.  He played a cruel trick; he insulted you and wronged me by that deceit, and I find it very hard to pardon him.”

“What! what is that!” and Mr. Bopp looked up with tears still shining in his beard, and intense surprise in every feature of his face.

Dolly turned scarlet, and her heart beat fast as she repeated with an unsteady voice,—­

“It was Dick, not I.”

A cloud swept over Mr. Bopp’s face, and he knit his brows a moment as if Dolly had not been far from right when she said “he never would forgive the joke.”  Presently, he spoke in a tone she had never heard before,—­cold and quiet,—­and in his eye she thought she read contempt for her brother and herself,—­

“I see now, and I say no more but this; it was not kind when I so trusted you.  Yet it is well, for you and Richart are so one, I haf no doubt he spoke your wish.”

Here was a desperate state of things.  Dolly had done her best, yet he did not, or would not, understand, and, before she could restrain them, the words slipped over her tongue,—­

“No!  Dick and I never agree.”

Mr. Bopp started, swept three spoons and a tea-cup off the table as he turned, for something in the hasty whisper reassured him.  The color sprang up to his cheek, the old warmth to his eye, the old erectness to his figure, and the eager accent to his voice.  He rose, drew Dolly nearer, took her face between his hands, and bending, fixed on her a look tender yet masterful, as he said with an earnestness that stirred her as words had never done before,—­

“Dollee, he said No! do you say, Yes?”