It began to darken in the low room; the needles of the old woman were still clicking busily; the cuckoo clock in the corner was ticking louder and louder in the deep silence, and Oswald was still sitting by the open window, his head leaning on his hand, as in a dream.

The rolling of a vehicle which came up the village street aroused him. A light open carriage, with two horses, stopped at the cottage door; a man stepped out lightly and entered the room.

"Good evening," said a dear, rather decided voice. "Doctor Stein?--very glad to make your acquaintance--my name is Braun. Bruno told me I would find the Good Samaritan here--how is our patient?--ah, there in the bed?--what do you say, my good woman, could you get us a light, while Doctor Stein has the kindness to tell me all he knows about the case?"

Oswald described what he had seen as well as he could.

"I thought so," said Doctor Braun; "it is an attack of epilepsy. Has your son ever had an attack before?" he asked the old woman, who was coming back, protecting a thin tallow candle with her hand, so that only a faint gleam fell upon her wrinkled face.

"He is not my son, and his wife was not my daughter," said Mother Claus, placing the candle on a settee near the bed; "but his children are my dear grandchildren."

The doctor cast a searching glance at the face of the old woman--and then his eye turned to Oswald--but he kept the remark he was going to make to himself, took the light, and examined the face of the sick man.

Oswald took the candle and said: "Please let me help you."

"Thank you," said the doctor, examining the patient

In the mean time Oswald looked more closely at the newcomer. He was a man of from twenty-five to thirty, tall and rather thin, dressed in a simple, comfortable, but elegant summer costume. His head was remarkably well formed, and thickly covered with very dark hair, which refused to curl, and stood like a kind of cap around the firm, somewhat prominent forehead. The nose did not belong to any well-defined class, but it was finely cut and full of expression; so was also the mouth, with its lips sharply defined, and yet delicately formed, as we find them in antique heads, especially in Mercuries, as if they might fully part for the sake of a pleasant, intelligent word. A thick silky beard covered chin and cheeks, harmonizing in color and feature with the hair, and completing the manly fair character of the face. Oswald also noticed, as the doctor was raising the eyelids of his patient, that his hands were of almost womanly delicacy and beauty of form.

"It is as I thought," said Doctor Braun, rising; "an epileptic attack. I can prescribe nothing; nature will help. For the present he must be kept quiet. To-morrow he will be rather weak, but otherwise quite well again."

"Then such attacks are not dangerous?" asked Oswald.

"They can become fatal," replied the doctor, "especially when the patient is a hard drinker, as I presume is the case here. A radical cure is not to be expected, at least not under these circumstances; it is always long and tedious."

"I had made up my mind to spend part of the night here," said Oswald; "but now, I suppose that is not necessary?"

"By no means! Rest, as I said, is all that is required. The man is a widower?" he added, looking around in the room.

"Annie is dead," said Mother Claus; "but I'll take care of Jake. Old people like myself don't need much sleep; we shall soon have time enough to sleep. You can safely go home, young gentleman. You are very good; I always said so. Good-by, doctor; many thanks for Jake, as he can't thank you himself, and perhaps he wouldn't thank you even if he could. Good-by, young master."

With these words she showed the two to the door and out of the house.

"Will you come with me a little way?" said the doctor, as they were standing outside the door. "I shall go by Berkow, where I have to make a call in the village, and you can get out whenever you wish. The evening is really magnificent, and you are, at any rate, too late for supper at Grenwitz, as I can tell you from best authority, for I have taken supper there myself."

"You have taken supper there?" said Oswald, taking a seat in the doctor's carriage; "did Bruno not find you at home?"

"The poor boy had his ride for nothing; for while he was racing at full speed to my house, I was quietly enjoying myself at Grenwitz."

"And may I ask what brought you to Grenwitz?"

The doctor laughed. "O tempora, o mores--there you are! Mentor protects and nurses other people's children and does not know that his own Telemachus is lying dangerously ill at home."

"You are pleased to joke."

"Indeed I do; Malte is as well as a boy can be who wants to have no lessons to-morrow. But he had taken a long walk and was tired; this looked to the baron and the baroness like the beginning of typhus fever, and as there was no sensible man present to raise his voice against it, they sent at once for the unlucky man who enjoys the unenviable privilege of having to account for all the nonsense that can be found in people's heads--I mean the doctor. We had just finished supper, which--as you know, or, to speak with the baroness, as you ought to know--is always punctually served at eight o'clock, and I was just stepping into my carriage when that jewel of a boy, Bruno, came at full speed into the court-yard. You ought to have seen the horror of the baron and the baroness! He told us in breathless haste that Jake was about to die, and that Doctor Stein was by his bedside, and that I must come instantly. But, À propos, what does it mean that the old woman called you in that odd way, 'Young master?' I suppose I shall have to call you Baron Stein hereafter?"

"What an idea!" laughed Oswald, who was very much pleased with the manner of his new acquaintance. "No; I am as little of noble birth as Mother Claus, who, I cannot imagine why, but probably misled by some dim recollections of her early days, insists upon making me her young master."

"She is a strange old woman," said the doctor. "Just see how beautifully the moon rises there over the edge of the forest, and how lightly the mist is resting on the meadows--a very strange woman! I remember now that I have been struck by her before--she looks like--well, like what?"

"Like an old, old woman from Grimm's Fairy Tales, who at the proper time changes into a beautiful princess!"

"That is it--she has a wonderful fire in her deep-sunk eyes. She always looks to me as if her old face was only a mask under which she hides a youthful soul."

"So it is in reality," said Oswald, and he told the doctor the strange conversation he had had with Mother Claus the day before on the heath, and how her words had appeared to him as natural and truthful as the song of the lark on the heath, and how little he had been pleased afterwards with the sermon of the self-sufficient preacher.

"Yes indeed," said the doctor. "There is truth in Goethe's words: It annoys men to find the truth so simple. They always try to make people believe truth is a marvel, a great wonder, and therefore they adorn it with all kinds of gay rags and fragments, and then carry it about in procession; while such people, like our old woman, read only one chapter in the great book of the universe, but they read it again and again, for sixty, seventy years, till they know it by heart. And as the whole book is but one great revelation, they learn in the end just as much as the great crowd of partially learned men, who turn in restless haste leaf after leaf, pick out a little here and a little there, and are finally about as wise or as stupid as they were before."

"Yes indeed," said Oswald; "a striking proof of the justness of your remark is, for instance, the Baroness Grenwitz. What has she not read! German, French, English, and Swedish; sacred books and profane books; the best and the worst books. To-day I find her reading Rousseau's Confessions, to-morrow a catchpenny novel; to-day she studies Schleiermacher's religious discourses, to-morrow she is deep in the last horror by Dumas or Eugene Sue. In small matters she has good sense enough, but as soon as you approach the higher mysteries of our life here below, or as soon even as the question arises how a general conclusion can be obtained from the mass of details, she begins to talk nonsense, and produces such foolish aristocratic commonplace phrases that my head swims."

"This tendency of the baroness, I should think, does not serve to make your position in Grenwitz very pleasant?"

"Not exactly," replied Oswald, lightly; "but I try to weaken the addition of wormwood by avoiding as much as I can the philosophical effusions of the baroness, and by confining my intercourse with the family generally to the least possible frequency."

"But with all consideration to your time and your disposition, might you not have fixed these limits a little too narrow?" said the doctor, knocking off the ashes of his cigar.

"How so?" asked Oswald, not without some surprise.

"You will pardon my indiscretion," said the other, turning more fully towards Oswald, so as to look at him with his bright intelligent eyes. "You know that physicians are condemned to play the disagreeable part of confidential friends in the families in which they practise. At one or the other point, everything in life is, after all, closely connected with our body, and as we have the control of that part of our patients, we gradually are made judges of everything, even of such things which seem to belong before any other forum rather than that of the physician. And even if there happens to be no connection whatever between the two questions of soul and of body, the patient is very apt to think: If you have told him so much you may just as well tell him a little more. Thus the baroness could not help telling me to-day--I am not going to flatter you or to annoy you, but only to give you a hint, which you may follow or not, just as you like--that you, who possessed such a very great gift to make yourself agreeable, and who could, if you chose, be so perfectly at home in well-bred society, were rather disposed to make no use of these talents. She regretted this all the more, she added, as this reserve caused a great loss to Malte, who was by nature a domestic boy and never so happy as in the family circle, and who now could not enjoy the privileges which he would otherwise derive from being in your society and becoming intimate with you."

"Is it not strange," said Oswald, after a short pause, "what inapproachable beings some of us children of Adam are? What you have just told me, I have told myself more than once. I have admonished myself that having once agreed to sell my time and my talents for the benefit of this family, I am bound to make all necessary concessions--and yet, now that I hear you say the same thing, it wounds my feelings.... But I beg to assure you that it is not you I blame, but only myself, and that I am all the more pleased with myself because the hint you are giving me with such kind intentions ought certainly not to have disturbed me for a moment."

"I was sure," said the doctor, "that I had to do with a man who knows how to separate the chaff from the grain; if I had not been sure of that, you may be convinced I would not have spoken."

There followed another pause in the conversation of the two young men; the doctor repented perhaps in silence having been led by his good-nature to perform the ungrateful duty of giving advice unasked, while Oswald pursued his thoughts, and seemed to forget entirely that the pine-trees were swiftly gliding past him, and the doctor's swift horses had nearly accomplished the distance between Grenwitz and Berkow. He started in great surprise when he saw a light shining through the branches to the right of the road. He knew it came from the house of the forester at Berkow. On the other side a path led up to the clearing in the forest, where Melitta's hermitage stood. At this very place where they now were, the baron's carriage had been waiting for him the day before.

"Pray let me get out here," he said hurriedly to the doctor. "I am amazed to see that we are actually near Berkow. It is high time for me to return."

The carriage stopped and Oswald got out.

"I hope," he said, shaking hands with the doctor, "that this has not been the only distance nor the longest distance on the great road of life on which we shall keep each other company."

"I hope and wish the same," replied the other. "It seems to me as if our thoughts and feelings had much in common with each other, and to meet thus a kindred nature is far too fortunate a thing to be easily given up again. At all events, I shall soon be again in this neighborhood. In the mean time, good-by."

The carriage rolled away; the sounds soon ceased to be heard; the light in the forester's house disappeared--Oswald was alone amid darkness and silence.

And at once Melitta's image appeared again before his mind's eye, and swiftly glided before him along the narrow forest path on which he now crept stealthily and silently like a poacher. Suddenly he found himself on the clearing; he stopped, frightened as if lightning had fallen by his side--there was a light in the window of the cottage! He had left Melitta at the chÂteau, and she was here, not fifty yards from where he stood--he had only to cross the meadow and to ascend a few steps--to open a door. Oswald leant against the trunk of a beech-tree to calm his wildly beating heart. And if anybody should see him here! If he should recklessly endanger Melitta's reputation! Breathless he listened ... the night was silent ... he heard nothing but those strange, mysterious voices which are never heard in broad daylight, and which are born at the break of night: a whispering and twittering up in the branches, a rustling and rushing below in the dry leaves on the ground--the subdued barking of a dog far out in a village. An owl came swiftly and silently on its broad wings and nearly touched his face; it flew off like an arrow. Otherwise all around still as the grave. But what is that? A low, threatening growl, close to his ear? It was Melitta's gigantic dog, who kept watch and guard at the entrance to the cottage. The faithful guardian probably had discovered the presence of a stranger, for he rose, jumped down the steps, and came bounding along, running around the house like a shepherd's dog around his flock.

"Boncoeur?" called Oswald, as the animal came near him; "ici!"

The intelligent creature started at the well-known call, which he heard so constantly from the lips of his mistress, and quickly recognizing Oswald, he came rushing up to him and welcomed him by putting his huge paws on his breast and his shoulders.

"Ah!" said Oswald, caressing the beautiful animal, "ah! you permit me then to see your mistress? Come!"

Holding the dog by his long, curly hair, Oswald went across the meadow. On the steps the noise of Boncoeur's paws deadened the sound of his own light footsteps, and thus he crept along on the veranda which surrounded the cottage till he came to the window. The window was open, and through the Venetian ivy which had been trained over it Oswald looked into the room. On the table stood a burning lamp, the globe of which was covered with a red veil, so that the sacred image of Venus looked, in the rosy light, as if it were alive. Melitta was sitting at the foot of the statue near a table, turning her face toward Oswald. She had an open book before her, but she was evidently not reading; the delicate hand which supported her head was buried in the dark, abundant hair, and she seemed to be buried in thought. An inexpressibly touching expression, full of plaintive melancholy and of surpassing happiness, lay on her chaste, childlike features. Oswald had to make a great effort not to destroy the incomparably beautiful picture as it stood before him in the frame of the small window. At last he whispered her name.

Melitta raised her head, and fixing her large eyes fully upon the window, she listened for a moment. But then she smiled sadly, as if she wished to say: It was but a dream, and rested her head again in her hand.

"Melitta--it is I."

This time she had not dreamt. She started up with a cry of joy, to the door, to meet Oswald. She wound her arms around his neck, she felt his burning lips again and again on her own; she laid her head on his bosom; she looked through her tears up at him and said: "See, Oswald, I was just thinking of you. I said to myself: If he loves you he will come, he will surely be here to-day, and if he does not come, he does not love you! Oswald, you do love me--don't you? Not as much as I love you, but still, you love me a little, eh, Oswald?"

Speechless with emotion and happiness, Oswald embraced her again and again.

"Melitta, you are inexpressibly good and beautiful--whoever loves you must love you boundlessly."

Before the door of the hermitage, on a straw mat, his colossal head between his forepaws, lies Boncoeur. The swift motion of his ears, as soon as he hears a noise from the forest, shows he is keeping faithful watch. He would tear any one to pieces who should dare to intrude upon this temple of love.