Els doubtless noticed it, but with no bitter or sorrowful thoughts.  She and the beloved dying woman understood one another.  Each knew what she was to the other.  Her mother need not doubt, nor did she, that, whatever obstacles life might place in her pathway, Els would pursue the right course even without counsel and guidance.  But Eva needed her love and care so much just now, and when the sufferer gave her older daughter also a tender glance and vainly strove to falter a few words of thanks, Els herself replaced in Eva’s the hand which her mother had withdrawn.

Fran Maria nodded gently to Els, as if asking her sensible elder daughter to watch over her forsaken sister in her place.

Then her eyes again sought her husband, but the priest, to whom she had just confessed, approached her instead.

After the holy man had performed the duties of his office, she again turned her head toward Eva.  It seemed as though she was feasting her eyes on her daughter’s charms.  Meanwhile she strove to utter what more she desired to say, but the bystanders understood only the words—­they were her last:  “We thought—­should be untouched—­But now Heaven——­”

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.