"DEAR GRANDFATHER,--Since receiving your letter I have passed the days and nights in terrible anxiety beside my little sister's bed. Her disease is nervous fever, and she was at first dangerously ill, but the fever is gradually, I trust, subsiding, and I am apparently able to take more repose. But only apparently, for since I have been somewhat easier in mind with regard to Lisbeth I have been all the more miserable with regard to myself; and if I have at last arrived at a conclusion, it is with no sense of victory, and my heart trembles as well as my hand while I write that I cannot return to Dönninghausen. If Otto means to propose to me the alternative of severing myself either from you or from my father, whose memory I cherish in those he has left behind him, we have never understood each other, never loved each other, and I give him back his troth. That a separation from him deprives me also of you, of Aunt Thekla, and of a home which I love, is the severest trial that could befall me; but I must bear it. Farewell, dear, dear grandfather! Forgive me. Do not think me ungrateful; and, in spite of appearances, believe in the unalterable love and veneration of your grand-daughter "JOHANNA." The Freiherr had long finished reading the letter, when he still sat gazing at the uncertain characters in which Johanna's usual firm, clear handwriting was hardly to be recognized. _This_ he had not expected,--had not thought possible. But if she could thus resign Dönninghausen, without even asking if some compromise were not possible, he, too, would hold unalterably to the justice of his course. "Read that!" he said at last, in a harsh, hoarse tone, as he handed the sheet to his sister. "Tell Otto how the matter stands. I do not want to speak of the foolish girl again." CHAPTER XXIV. DR. URBAN WOLF. Johanna had thought that the worst was over when she took her departure from Dönninghausen; and, indeed, the first days and nights that she spent by her sister's bedside were occupied wholly with care and anxiety for the little one. The child lay in the delirium of fever,--raved in terror of a little black pony,--declared, screaming, that she never would dance again, never would appear in the circus; while Helena, with tears, confessed that Lisbeth's illness was the result of a fall she had while at a rehearsal. Johanna's presence seemed to soothe the child, and, forgetting herself, she was always beside her bed; but then came the letters from the home she had left, and they recalled all the old pain and conflict.