Here she paused and, after closing her eyes for a time, went on in a lower but perfectly distinct tone:  “You are good—­I hope—­the forge-fire of life—­it is fortunate for you The heart and its demands The hap—­pi —­ness—­which it—­gave—­me——­ It ought—­it must—­you, too——­”

Whilst speaking she had again glanced towards her husband, then at the Abbess Kunigunde, who knelt beside him, and as the abbess met the look she thought, “She is entrusting the child to me, and desires Eva to be happy as one of us and the fairest of the brides of Heaven!” Ernst Ortlieb, wholly overpowered by the deepest grief, was far from enquiring into the meaning of these last words of his beloved dying wife.

Els, on the contrary, who had learned to read the sufferer’s features and understood her even without words when speech was difficult, had watched every change in the expression of her features with the utmost attention.  Without reflecting or interpreting, she was sure that the movements of her dying mother’s lips had predicted to Eva that the “forge fire of life” would exert its purifying and moulding influence on her also, and wished that in the world, not in the convent, she might be as happy as she herself had been rendered by her father’s love.

After these farewell words Frau Maria’s features became painfully distorted, the lids drooped over her eyes, there was a brief struggle, then a slight gesture from the physician announced to the weeping group that her earthly pilgrimage was over.

No one spoke.  All knelt silently, with clasped hands, beside the couch, until Eva, as if roused from a dream, shrieked, “She will never come back again!” and with passionate grief threw herself upon the lifeless form to kiss the still face and beseech her to open her dear eyes once more and not leave her.

How often she had remained away from the invalid in order to let her aunt point out the path for her own higher happiness whilst Els nursed her mother; but now that she had left her, she suddenly felt what she had possessed and lost in her love.  It seemed as if hitherto she had walked beneath the shadow of leafy boughs, and her mother’s death had stripped them all away as an autumn tempest cruelly tears off the foliage.  Henceforth she must walk in the scorching sun without protection or shelter.  Meanwhile she beheld in imagination fierce flames blazing brightly from the dark soot—­the forge fire of life, to which the dead woman’s last words had referred.  She knew what her mother had wished to say, but at the present time she lacked both the desire and the strength to realise it.

For a time each remained absorbed by individual grief.  Then the father drew both girls to his heart and confessed that, with their mother’s death life, already impoverished by the loss of his only son, had been bereft of its last charm.  His most ardent desire was to be summoned soon to follow the departed ones.