Gretchen, such as Faust loved and ruined, nor was she the omniscient
damsel of modern society. During the greater part of her existence she
had lived without any companions but her mother and the faithful
Berbel. But she had grown up in a wild forest country, in a huge
dismantled stronghold, of which the windows looked out over the
tumbling torrent, and across endless thousands of giant trees, whose
dark tops rose like sombre points of shadow out of the deeper shade
below. Even the sky was not blue. Half a kingdom of firs and pines and
hemlocks drank the colour from the air and left but a sober neutral
tint behind. The sun does not give half the light in the Black Forest
that he gives elsewhere. As Hilda had never, within her recollection,
seen an open plain, much less a city, her idea of the world beyond
those leagues of trees in which she lived was not a very accurate one.
She could hardly guess what the streets of a great town were like, or
what effect a crowd of civilised people would produce upon her sight.
And yet she was far from ignorant. There were books enough left at
Sigmundskron for her education, and the baroness had done what was in
her power to impart such instruction as she could command. Hilda had
probably read as many books as most girls of her age, and had read them
more carefully, but she was very far from loving study for its own
sake. Her time, too, was occupied in other ways, for she and her mother
did most things for themselves, as was to be expected in a household
where want reigned supreme over the hours of every day, from sunrise to
sunset.

The necessity for maintaining appearances was small indeed, but such as
it was, neither mother nor daughter could avoid it. No one could
predict what day the Greifensteins would choose for one of their
occasional visits, and in the time of the vacations no one could
foresee when Greif might make his appearance, striding over the wooded