Whoever prayed thus in solitude had a soul yearning for the loftiest things.  Others might say what they chose, she knew him better.  This man, from the first hour of their meeting, had loved her with the most ardent but also with the holiest passion; never, never had he sought her merely for wanton amusement.  Her mother’s last wish would be fulfilled.  She need only trust him with her whole soul, and leave the “forge fire of life” to strengthen and purify her.

Now she remembered where the dying woman had heard the phrase.

Her Aunt Christine had used it recently in her mother’s presence.  Young Kunz Schurstab had fallen into evil ways in Lyons.  Every one, even his own father, had given him up for lost; but after several years he returned home and proved himself capable of admirable work, both in his father’s business and in the Council.  In reply to Frau Ortlieb’s enquiry where this transformation in the young man had occurred, her aunt answered: 

“In the forge fire of life.”  Eva told herself that she had intentionally kept aloof from its flames, and in the convent, perhaps, they would never have reached her.  Yesterday they had seized upon her for the first time, and henceforward she would not evade them, that she might obey her mother and become worthy of the man praying silently yonder.  He owed to his heroic courage and good sword a renowned name; but what had she ever done save selfishly to provide for her own welfare in this world and the next?  She had not even been strong enough to hold the head of the mother, to whom she owed everything and who had loved her so tenderly, when the convulsions attacked her.

Even after she closed her eyes in death—­she had noticed it—­she had been kept from every duty in the household and for the beloved dead, because it was deemed unsuitable for her, and Els and every one avoided putting the serious demands of life between the “little saint” and her aspirations towards the bliss of heaven.  Yet Eva knew that she could accomplish whatever she willed to do, and instead of using the strength which she felt stirring with secret power in her fragile body, she had preferred to let it remain idle, in order to dwell in another world from that in which she had been permitted to prove her might.  The fire of the forge, by whose means pieces of worthless iron were transformed into swords and ploughshares, should use its influence upon her also.  Let it burn and torture her, if it only made her a genuine, noble woman, a woman like her Aunt Christine, from whom her mother had heard the phrase of “the forge fire of life,” who aided and pointed out the right path to hundreds, and probably, at her age, had needed neither an Els nor an Abbess Kunigunde to keep her, body and soul, in the right way.  She loved both; but some impulse within rebelled vehemently against being treated like a child, and—­now that her mother was dead—­subjecting her own will to that of any other person than the man to whom she would have gladly looked up as a master.