"How pleasant it was then at home, up there in the valley! He was our neighbor's son, good, and industrious, and handsome,--oh, far handsomer than any one nowadays, begging your pardon. But he--I hardly need mention his name, for every one knows it was Anton Striegler--he was bent upon going abroad, and he went abroad on business. There at the brook we said good by. 'Franzl,' he said, 'as long as that brook runs, my heart will be true to you. Keep yours true to me.' He had beautiful ways of talking, and he could write beautifully too. It is always so with those false men. I could not have believed it. I received seventeen letters from him during the first four years,--from France, from England, and from Spain. The letter from England cost in all a crown-piece; for Napoleon would allow no tea or coffee to come into our country, and so the letter, as our curate said, had to go by way of Constantinople through Austria, and, by the time it reached me, cost a whole crown-piece. Since that no letter has come. I waited fourteen years, and then learned that he had married a black woman in Spain. I would have nothing more to do with the base man,--the basest man that ever lived,--and I burned the beautiful letters, the lying letters that he had written me. My love went up the chimney in the smoke." Franzl always concluded her story with the selfsame words. To-day she had had a good listener,--the best of listeners. He had but one fault, that of not hearing a word she said. His eyes were fixed on her and his thoughts on Annele. Out of gratitude Franzl came at last to speak of her. "I will tell Annele what you are. No one knows you as well as I do. In all your life you never harmed a child; and how good you have always been to me! Don't look so sorrowful. Be merry! I know,--ah, too well I know!--when so great happiness comes to us, we feel crushed under it. But, thank God! you are in earnest; you will stay quietly at home together and bid each other good morning and good night every day that God gives you. And now I must say good night, for it is late." It was past midnight before Lenz went to bed, and then with a "Good night, Annele! good night, dear heart!" he fell asleep. He awoke the next morning with a strange weight on his heart. He remembered he had dreamed, and in his dream he stood upon the high mountain ridge behind his house with one foot raised to step off into space. "I never let a dream trouble me before," he said, and tried to forget it in admiration of his yesterday's gold coin, and of the still greater treasure he possessed in Annele's little shoes and first frock. They were holy relics, to be carefully preserved with those he had received from his mother. A message came from the landlady that he was to be at the Lion at eleven o'clock. He put on his Sunday clothes and hastened to his uncle Petrovitsch's. After pulling the bell several times he was admitted and received by his uncle in no very amiable mood.