ut when Linda was eleven, the
widow was persuaded by a friend that it was her duty to send her
niece to school; and when Linda at sixteen ceased to be a school
girl, she had learned to think that the religion of her aunt's
neighbours was a more comfortable religion than that practised by
her aunt; and when she was eighteen, she had further learned to
think that the life of certain neighbour girls was a pleasanter life
than her own. When she was twenty, she had studied the subject more
deeply, and had told herself that though her spirit was prone to
rebel against her aunt, that though she would fain have been allowed
to do as did other girls of twenty, yet she knew her aunt to be a
good woman, and knew that it behoved her to obey. Had not her aunt
come all the way from Cologne, from the distant city of Rhenish
Prussia, to live in Nuremberg for her sake, and should she be
unfaithful and rebellious? Now Madame Staubach understood and
appreciated the proneness to rebellion in her niece's heart, but did
not quite understand, and perhaps could not appreciate, the attempt
to put down that rebellion which the niece was ever making from day
to day.

I have said that the widow Staubach had brought with her to Nuremberg
some income upon which to live in the red house with the three
gables. Some small means of her own she possessed, some few hundred
florins a-year, which were remitted to her punctually from Cologne;
but this would not have sufficed even for the moderate wants of
herself, her niece, and of the old maid Tetchen, who lived with them,
and who had lived with Linda's mother. But there was a source of
income very ready to the widow's hand, and of which it was a matter
of course that she should in her circumstances avail herself. She and
her niece could not fill the family home, and a portion of it was let
to a lodger. This lodger was Herr Steinmarc--Peter Steinmarc, who had
been clerk to Linda's father when Linda's father had been clerk to
the city magistrates, and who was now clerk to the city magistrates
himself. Peter Steinmarc in the old days had inhabited a garret in
the house, and had taken his meals at his master's table; but now the
first floor of the house was his own, the big airy pleasant chamber
looking out from under one gable on to the clear water, and the broad
passage under the middle gable, and the square large bedroom--the
room in which Linda had been born--under the third gable. The windows
from these