To the lady's promise of coming to see her
she replied, "Friedel and Ebbo, too," and, receiving no response to
this request, she burst out, "Then I won't come! I am the
Freiherrinn Thekla, the heiress of Adlerstein Wildschloss and
Felsenbach. I won't be a nun. I'll be married! You shall be my
husband," and she made a dart at the nearest youth, who happened to
be Ebbo.
"Ay, ay, you shall have him. He will come for you, sweetest
Fraulein," said the perplexed Grethel, "so only you will come home!
Nobody will come for you if you are naughty."
"Will you come if I am good?" said the spoilt cloister pet, clinging
tight to Ebbo.
"Yes," said her father, as she still resisted, "come back, my child,
and one day shall you see Ebbo, and have him for a brother."
Thereat Ebbo shook off the little grasping fingers, almost as if they
had belonged to a noxious insect.
"The matron's coif should succeed the widow's veil." He might talk
with scholarly contempt of the new race of Bohemian impostors; but
there was no forgetting that sentence.
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