"Will you ask Frau Scherer who this is?"

My friend repeated my question, and received
a long reply in German. Then she turned round
and translated it to me.

"It is the likeness of a great-aunt of her
husband's." (My friend was standing by me,
and looking at the picture with sympathetic
curiosity.) " See! here is the name on the open
page of this Bible, 'Anna Scherer, 1778.' Frau
Scherer says there is a tradition in the family
that this pretty girl, with her complexion of
lilies and roses, lost her colour so entirely through
fright, that she was known by the name of the
Grey Woman. She speaks as if this Anna
Scherer lived in some state of life-long terror.
But she does not know details; refers me to her
husband for them. She thinks he has some
papers which were written by the original of
that picture for her daughter, who died in this
very house not long after our friend there was
married. We can ask Herr Scherer for the
whole story if you like."

"Oh yes, pray do!" said I. And, as our
host came in at this moment to ask how we
were faring, and to tell us that he had sent to
Heidelberg for carriages to convey us home,
seeing no chance of the heavy rain abating, my
friend, after thanking him, passed on to my
request.

"Ah!" said he, his face changing, "the
aunt Anna had a sad history. It was all owing
to one of those hellish Frenchmen; and her
daughter suffered for it—the cousin Ursula,
as we all called her when I was a child. To be
sure the good cousin Ursula was his child as
well. The sins of the fathers are visited on
their children. The lady would like to know all
about it, would she? Well, there are papers—
a kind of apology the aunt Anna wrote for
putting an end to her daughter's engagement—or
rather facts which she revealed, that prevented
cousin Ursula from marrying the man she
loved; and so she would never have any other
good fellow, else I have heard say my father
would have been thankful to have made her his
wife." All this time he was rummaging in the
drawer of an old-fashioned bureau, and now he
turned round, with a bundle of yellow MSS. in
his hand, which he gave to my friend, saying,
"Take it home, take it home, and if you care
to make out our crabbed German writing, you
may keep it as long as you like, and read it at
your leisure. Only I must have it back again
when you have done with it, that's all."

And so we became possessed of the
manuscript of the following letter, which it was our
employment, during many a long evening that
ensuing winter, to translate, and in some parts
to abbreviate. The letter began with some
reference to the pain which she had already
inflicted upon her daughter by some unexplained
opposition to a project of marriage; but I doubt
if, without the clue with which the good miller
had furnished us, we could have made out even
this much from the passionate, broken sentences
that made us fancy that some scene between
the mother and daughter—and possibly a third
person—had occurred just before the mother
had begun to write.

"Thou dost not love thy child, mother!
Thou dost not care if her heart is broken!"
Ah, God! and these words of my heart-beloved
Ursula ring in my ears as if the sound of them
would fill them when I lie a-dying. And her
poor tear-stained face comes between me and
everything else. Child! hearts do not break;
life is very tough as well as very terrible. But
I will not decide for thee. I will tell thee all;
and thou shalt bear the burden of choice. I
may be wrong; I have little wit left, and never
had much, I think; but an instinct serves me in
place of judgment, and that instinct tells me
that thou and thy Henri must never be married.
Yet I may be in error. I would fain make my
child happy. Lay this paper before the good
priest Schriesheim; if, after reading it, thou
hast doubts which make thee uncertain. Only I
will tell thee all now, on condition that no spoken
word ever passes between us on the subject.
It would kill me to be questioned. I should
have to see all present again.

My father held, as thou knowest, the mill on
the Neckar, where thy new-found uncle, Scherer,
now lives. Thou rememberest the surprise with
which we were received there last vintage twelve-
month. How thy uncle disbelieved me when I
said that I was his sister Anna, whom he had
long believed to be dead, and how I had to lead
thee underneath the picture, painted of me long
ago, and point out, feature by feature, the likeness
between it and thee; and how, as I spoke,
I recalled first to my own mind, and then by
speech to his, the details of the time when it
was painted; the merry words that passed
between us then, a happy boy and girl; the
position of the articles of furniture in the room;
our father's habits; the cherry-tree, now cut
down, that shaded the window of my bedroom,
through which my brother was wont to squeeze
himself, in order to spring on to the topmost
bough that would bear his weight; and thence
would pass me back his cap laden with fruit to
where I sat on the window-sill, too sick with
fright for him to care much for eating the
cherries.

And at length Fritz gave way, and believed
me to be his sister Anna, even as though I were
risen from the dead. And thou rememberest
how he fetched in his wife, and told her that I
was not dead, but was come back to the old
home once more, changed as I was. And she
would scarce believe him, and scanned me with
a cold, distrustful eye, till at length—for I knew
her of old as Babette Müller—I said that I was
well-to-do, and needed not to seek out friends
for what they had to give. And then she asked
—not me, but her husband—why I had kept
silent so long, leading all—father, brother, every
one that loved me in my own dear home—to
esteem me dead. And then thine uncle (thou
rememberest?) said he cared not to know more
than I cared to tell; that I was his Anna, found
again, to be a blessing to him in his old age, as