Three years had, indeed, passed since her husband had died, which was
just as long as their married life had lasted.

Her eyes closed and her mind went back to the time when she had first
come to the town, only a few days after their marriage--which had taken
place in Vienna. They had only indulged in a modest honeymoon trip, such
as a man in humble circumstances, who had married a woman without any
dowry, could treat himself to. They had taken the boat from Vienna, up
the river, to a little village in Wachau, not far from their future home,
and had spent a few days there. Bertha could still remember clearly the
little inn at which they had stayed, the riverside garden in which they
used to sit after sunset, and those quiet, rather tedious, evenings which
were so completely different from those her girlish imagination had
previously pictured to her as the evenings which a newly-married couple
would spend. Of course, she had had to be content.

She was twenty-six years old and quite alone in the world when Victor
Mathias Garlan had proposed to her. Her parents had recently died. A long
time before, one of her brothers had gone to America to seek his fortune
as a merchant. Her younger brother was on the stage; he had married an
actress, and was playing comedy parts in third-rate German theatres. She
was almost out of touch with her relations and the only one whom she
visited occasionally was a cousin who had married a lawyer. But even that
friendship had grown cool as years had passed, because the cousin had
become wrapped up in her husband and children exclusively, and had almost
ceased to take any interest in the doings of her unmarried friend.

Herr Garlan was a distant relation of Bertha's mother. When Bertha was
quite a young girl he had often visited the house and made love to her in
a rather awkward way. In those days she had no reasons to encourage him,