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"Frida," he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes, "don't you yourself feel it?" He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry with him.
"You may bring them with you. And as soon as you like, too. Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature's roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity." Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Heymoor.
Ere they parted she and Frida knelt together in prayer, and Miss Drechsler asked that God would use the child as His messenger to the poor, sorrowing, suffering ones in the Forest; after which she took Frida's Bible and put marks in at the different passages which she thought would be suitable to the different cases of the people that Wilhelm had spoken of.
His face was very near hers, and he was a son of Adam, like all the rest of us not a being of another sphere, as Frida was sometimes half tempted to consider him.
He bent over the woman of his choice and kissed her with chaste warmth. On the forehead first, then, after a short interval, twice on the lips. At each kiss, from which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognising its purity, Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her. She quivered from head to foot. The scales fell from her eyes.
Wilhelm and Elsie strove in vain to raise her, but when Pastor Langen drew near and whispered the words, "Look up, Frida; thy father is not here, he is with Jesus," a smile of joy played on the child's face, and rising she dried her tears, and putting her hand into that of Elsie she prepared to leave the "God's acre," and the little party set off for their home in the Black Forest.
And then her voice grew softer and there was a certain anxiety in it: "He used to come here formerly, but he never does now does he, mother?" Frau Lämke shook her head: "No, never." She did not feel at all at her ease, everything seemed so strange to her: Frau Schlieben in their cellar, and what did she want with Frida? Something had happened, there was something wrong.
The day of which we write was the first one since her father's death that Frida had played on the violin, so neither Wilhelm nor Elsie was aware that she could do so at all. The pastor was approaching the cottage when the sound of music reached his ears, and having a good knowledge of that art himself, he stood still to listen.
"Pa got raised from one dollar and a quarter to one dollar and a half just six weeks from the day Pearl left, lackin' two days," and Mrs. Evans gave Mary a new "stuff" dress, "on the Frida' as Pearl left or the Thursda' three weeks before," and, moreover, the latest McSorley baby was born "on the Wednesda' as Pearl was comin' home on the Saturda' four weeks after."
The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit there no longer to listen to their talk.
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