Their return to Blechow was grave and sad. The president silently strained to his breast the son restored to him from the gates of death; silently, too, he kissed the brow of his wife. The days that followed were calm and melancholy. The president worked hard with Auditor von Bergfeld, that he might leave everything in the most perfect order for his successor. Madame von Wendenstein went quietly about the house, occupied in the melancholy task of displacing the treasures collected during more than twenty years of house-keeping, and the remembrances they awakened were known only to her eye and her heart. All those treasures had to be packed in huge coffers, and conveyed to the new house. And the enormous oaken chests looked so sad, with their opened doors and their empty trays, and throughout the house sighed the gloomy spirit of departure and separation, the spirit that moves through human life like a messenger of death, touching the heart with a shrinking foreboding of the last great farewell of eternity. Every farewell breaks a flower from the wreath adorning the spring-time of our lives, until the last blooms are buried beneath the wintry snows of death. But every blossom leaves a fruit behind, whose seed is in itself; and these will bear purer, fairer flowers, and spring up into imperishable beauty beneath the life-breath of eternal spring. Fritz Deyke had a long conversation with his father, who looked very black at first, when he heard what his son had to say. He loved his son, he had unbounded confidence in him, and he knew he would make no unworthy choice; but to have a town young lady for his daughter-in-law, to have a Prussian mistress in Hanoverian Wendland was not at all to his mind. But he said nothing, and, at his son's request, he went to the castle to see Madame von Wendenstein. The old lady he had always regarded as a model of womanly perfection, and she told him of all the attention and kindness her son had received in old Lohmeier's house, taking care to describe the excellent burgher position held by Margaret's father. Then she kindly and warmly urged him not to visit the misfortunes of the times upon innocent heads; and he held out his hand to her, and said,-- "It shall be as my son wishes. He is good and true: the wife he brings to my house shall be welcome, and my blessing shall rest upon her." Then Madame von Wendenstein opened the door into the next room, and Margaret, blushing deeply, and trembling from agitation, entered; but her eyes were bright and candid. She was dressed in the costume of the rich peasant women of Wendland. She went up quickly to the old man, and kissed his hand, and a warm tear fell upon the hand hardened with toil. A gentle smile passed over the stern, furrowed face of the old peasant; his eyes looked milder than they had done for many a day, as he gazed down upon the young girl's strong, yet slender form. He stroked her glossy hair, and said, in a low voice,--