The world had been so hard to her, and was growing so much harder, that it would be a good thing to get away from it.

If she could become ill and die, with a good kind nun standing by her bedside, and with the cross pressed to her bosom, and with her eyes fixed on the sweet face of the Virgin Mother as it was painted in the little picture in her room--in that way she thought that death might even be grateful.
But to be carried away she knew not whither in the cold, silent, black-flowing Moldau! And yet she half believed the prophecy of Lotta.
Such a quiet death as that she had pictured to herself could not be given to her! What nun would come to her bedside--to the bed of a girl who had declared to all Prague that she intended to marry a Jew?
For weeks past she had feared even to look at the picture of the Virgin.
"I'm afraid you'll think I am very late, father," she said, as soon as she reached home.
Her father muttered something, but not angrily, and she soon busied herself about him, doing some little thing for his comfort, as was her wont.

But as she did so she could not but remember that she had undertaken to be a spy upon him, to secrete his key, and to search surreptitiously for that which he was supposed to be keeping fraudulently.

As she sat by him empty-handed--for it was Sunday night, and as a Christian she never worked with a needle upon the Sunday--she told herself that she could not do it.

Could there be any harm done were she to ask him now, openly, what papers he kept in that desk?
But she desired to obey her lover where obedience was possible, and he had expressly forbidden her to ask any such question.