The old lady bit her lip. "I will write immediately," she said, and gathered up her train to go. "The situation in which I find myself placed, from no fault of my own, is scarcely an enviable one, I must say," she said, in a tone of some bitterness, elevating her eyebrows and speaking over her shoulder.
"And all on my account!" Kitty exclaimed, approaching, and extending her hand to detain the Frau President. "Moritz, you cannot mean that I, young girl as I am, should exclude any friend of the Frau President’s. It cannot be. Have I not my own home in the mill? I shall take up my abode there when Frau von Steiner arrives."
"That you certainly will not, my dear Kitty; I decidedly protest against that," the Frau President rejoined, coldly but firmly, and all the haughty arrogance of her nature shone in her eyes. "Your mother never had any unkindness upon my part to complain of; but this intimate association of the villa and the mill is repugnant to my very soul, and least of all would I expose such a connection to the severely critical eye of my refined and aristocratic friend." She stiffly inclined her head. "I shall be in the blue drawing-room, Moritz, in case you wish to present your guests." And she left the room.
The councillor waited with a scornful air until the rustle of her silken robes had died away and the door of the music-room had closed audibly, and then he indulged in a low chuckling laugh.
"You have had your lesson, Kitty," he said. "There is no doubt that the velvet paws conceal sharp claws. Yes, yes, the old cat knows how to scratch. I myself could show scars enough. But, thank Heaven, her turn has come! She must endure what she most abhors; she is no longer dangerous. With Von Bär pensioned, her influence at court and in society is destroyed." He rubbed his hands in smiling satisfaction. "Not a hair’s-breadth shall you stir, my dear child; you have a better right in my house than all the rest of them,—remember that!"
He was interrupted. A servant entering announced that the guests awaited their host. Moritz hastily seized his hat, and would have given Kitty his arm, but she slipped past him into the corridor. This transformed guardian, with his bewildering tenderness of voice and manner, pleased her not at all; his cold, business-like letters had been much more to her taste. What a strange change there was in him! Involuntarily she thought of her recent reception in this house; she seemed still to hear the anxious whisper in which the councillor had reminded her of the respect she owed to the Frau President; and here he was, sneering at her behind her back, and beginning to set bounds to her power, hitherto so unquestioned beneath his roof. All this terrified the young girl; it was inexplicable, and as uncomfortable as the close crimson room, with its musty odour of books and papers upon which she now turned her back to return to the house by the river.