Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/28

4 At first he was at a loss to find an explanation for the suicide. That this serious-minded spinster of mature years, with whom, as recently as their last luncheon, he had conversed on such a commonplace topic as their imminent departure, should suddenly have gone insane, seemed to him improbable. He found it much more natural to assume that Friederike had brooded upon suicide for a long time, perhaps for years, and that for some reason she had deemed just this peaceful hour of the afternoon suitable to the execution of her slowly ripened plan. That she might be hiding a gentle sadness beneath her uniformly quiet disposition had at times fleetingly crossed his mind, although his professional duties had made such extraordinary claims upon his time that he had never concerned himself greatly with the thought. Indeed, there grew upon him only gradually the consciousness that since her childhood he had scarcely ever seen his sister really cheerful.

Of her years of early womanhood he knew little, since, in his capacity as a ship's-doctor, he had passed that period in almost constant travel. When, some fifteen years before, he had retired from service in the Lloyd, his parents had just died in rapid succession; and it was shortly thereafter that she had left the town of her birth and the home of her childhood, and had joined him in order to attend him as his housekeeper in the various places of his sojourn. Though she was then considerably past the age of thirty, her figure had retained such youthful charm, her eyes such a dark and enigmatic glow, that she did not lack marked attentions; in fact, Emil sometimes had good reason to be apprehensive lest she might be carried off into a late marriage by some one of her admirers. When, with the years, the last prospect of this kind had vanished, she seemed to submit to her fate without complaint; and yet her brother now thought that he could remember many a mute look from her eyes, directed at him in silent reproach as though he, too, were somehow answerable for the haplessness of her existence. So, by and by, the consciousness of a wasted life had, perhaps, asserted itself, growing stronger as it was less outspoken, until she had finally preferred a swift end to the gnawing torment of such a confession. She had, to be sure, reduced her unsuspecting brother—and this at a period of life generally unfriendly to the formation of new habits—to the necessity of concerning himself with affairs of domestic economy—a necessity which Friederike's ministrations had up to