"The story of the Liebenstein,” she answered, I knew by heart when I was a little child."
And here her large, dark, passionate eyes looked into Flemming’s, and he doubted not that she had learned the story far too soon and far too well. That story he longed to hear, as if it were unknown to him; for he knew that the girl, who had got it by heart when a child, would tell it as it should be told. So he begged her to repeat the story, which she was but too glad to do; for she loved and believed it, as if it had all been written in the Bible. But before she began, she rested a moment on her oars, and, taking the crucifix which hung suspended from her neck, kissed it, and then let it sink down into her bosom, as if it were an anchor she was dropping into her heart. Meanwhile her moist, dark eyes were turned to heaven. Perhaps her soul was walking with the souls of Cunizza, and Rahab, and Mary Magdalen. Or perhaps she was thinking of that nun, of whom St. Gregory says, in his Dialogues, that, having greedily eaten a lettuce in a garden without making the sign of the cross, she found herself soon after possessed with a devil.
