On a bright day late in autumn, we find Clement once more in the room in which, as a boy, he had passed the time devoted to his cure. One of his friends and fellow-students had accompanied him; they had both passed the usual time at the University, and they were just returned from a long journey, in the course of which Wolf had been unwell, and wished to recruit himself in the quiet of the village. Clement was obliged to acquiesce, although, amongst all his friends, this was the very one he thought most unlikely to suit his father. He managed, however, to fall into the ways of thinking of the old people with unexpected tact and dexterity, and particularly won the mother's heart by the lively interest he pretended to take in all household matters; he was also able to give her many little bits of advice, and relieved a complaint under which she laboured by some simple remedy; for he had prepared himself to succeed an old uncle who was an apothecary, a profession for which his inclinations and acquirements really unfitted him; yet he was of an easy disposition and delighted to be quiet and to enjoy himself from time to time. He had never had much real feeling in common with Clement, and so at his first step into the rectory he felt himself in an utterly strange atmosphere, and would certainly have seized the smallest excuse for leaving a circle which constrained and wearied him, had not the blind girl struck him, at the first glance, as a remarkable problem to be solved. It is true she avoided him as much as she could. The first time he took her hand she withdrew it from his with an inexpressible disquietude, and quite lost her self-command, yet he hung about her for hours at a time, watched her way of managing affairs, and examined with a gay recklessness, which it was impossible to be angry with, the means by which she kept up a communication with the outer world, and studied the way in which the senses she had preserved, made up for the one she had lost; he could not understand why Clement thought so little of her. _He_, however, avoided meeting her more than ever, and particularly when he found her in Wolf's company; then he grew pale and turned away, and the villagers often met him in lonely forest paths, seemingly lost in gloomy reveries. He was returning one evening from a melancholy distant wandering, and had just passed from the wood into the corn-fields, when he met Wolf advancing towards him. Wolf was more excited than usual. After a long visit to Mary, who had interested him even more than ever, he had gone to the little village inn, and had drunk so much of the country wine, that he took a fancy to wander about the fields in the cool of the evening to refresh himself. "You will not get rid of me so soon!" he cried to Clement. "I must study your little blind witch a little more first; she is cleverer than a dozen women in the town, who only use their eyes to ogle God's man; and now she keeps me in order; it is really marvellous!"