The Breaking of the Storm by Friedrich Spielhagen

Latterly, while Ferdinanda still kept her bed, Uncle Ernst hardly left his room, and the Schmidt family circle therefore was to a great extent broken up, the two friends had divided their evenings between it and the Kreisels pretty regularly as they said, or very irregularly as Aunt Rikchen said. Reinhold was forced to agree with his aunt, and attempted no further excuses, as he did not want to tell any untruths, and could not acknowledge the true reason. The real truth was that his aunt's perpetual complaints threatened to destroy his last remnant of cheerfulness, while on the contrary he found the comfort and consolation that he so greatly needed in the atmosphere of sunshine which the sweet blind girl diffused around her. Latterly, indeed, even this sunshine had been a little clouded. The two friends had a suspicion, which they did not however impart to the poor girl, that the eccentric old gentleman, having made up his mind, as he said, that he could no longer with honour remain a Socialist, had sacrificed his dislike to speculation to the darling wish of his heart, to provide for Cilli after his own death, and had been speculating eagerly with the scanty means that he had toilsomely scraped together in the course of years. He was very mysterious about it indeed, and denied it roundly when Justus laughingly taxed him with it; but Justus would not be deceived, and even thought he could gather, from a casual expression the other had let fall, that it was the doubtful star of the Berlin-Sundin Railway to which the old man had confided the fragile bark of his fortunes. It seemed some confirmation of this opinion that latterly, when the almost worthless shares had become, in consequence of the new and dazzling prospectus, an object of the wildest speculation, and had consequently risen to double their value, the old gentleman's cheerfulness had returned also, and he had even ventured upon some of the dry witticisms which he only uttered when he was in the brightest spirits. Cilli said that now everything went well with her, and Reinhold, as she asserted this with her sweet smile, tried to stifle another and much worse anxiety -- an anxiety which he had once hinted to Justus, whereupon the latter had replied in his careless fashion: "Nonsense! Love is a weakness, angels have no weaknesses; Cilli is an angel, and so -- basta!"

He found Cilli alone in the modest little sitting-room, in the act of arranging the tea-things on the little round table in front of the hard, faded old sofa. She performed such small household duties with a confidence which would have quite deceived a stranger as to her infirmity, and with a grace which always had a fresh charm for Reinhold. She would not permit any assistance either. "It is cruel," said she, "not to let me do the little that I can do."