"Yes, live, live!" she cried, in such longing, passionate tones, and with so sad an expression of countenance, that Moritz's heart quaked. It seemed to him as though a string had broken on the harp on which she had just begun to play the joyous song of life and of love, and at this moment he saw grim death peering forth from behind the roses on her cheeks, and the smile on her crimson lips. "Come, my darling, let us be seated. There is your throne, and here at your feet lies he who adores you, looking up at his Madonna, at his Marie, with ecstacy." He bore her tenderly to the arm-chair, and then seated himself at her feet. He looked up at her with an expression of deep devotion, his folded hands resting on her lap. She bowed down over him and stroked with her pale little hand his black, curly hair, and the broad forehead she had once seen so gloomy and clouded, and which was now as clear and serene as the heaven in her own breast. "I have thee at last once more, thou star of my life! When I regard thee, I feel that life is, indeed, beautiful, and that one hour of bliss is not too dearly purchased with long years of suffering and want. We paid dearly, Philip, but now we have the longed-for happiness. We have it and will hold it fast; nothing on earth shall tear it from us?" "No, nothing on earth, my beloved! Like Odysseus, I have now returned from my wanderings through life, and here I lie at the feet of my Penelopeia; like him, I have driven off the suitors who aspired to the favor of my fair one. Was it not a suitor, who slipped out at the door when I entered?" "A suitor of the past," replied Marie, smiling. "Did you not recognize him?" "Have I ever known him? But what do we care, now that he has gone! I am not compelled to drive him off, nor yet to hang old Trude as a go-between, as Odysseus did the old woman of whom Homer tells us." Philip and Marie both laughed. It was the innocent childlike laughter with which happiness illumines even the gravest countenances, and which permits those who have been sorely tried, and have suffered greatly, to find the innocence of youth and the smile of childhood again on the threshold of paradise regained. "Marie, how beautiful you are when you laugh! Then it seems as though all these years of sorrow had not been--as though we had only been dreaming, and now awake to find that we are again in the little room under the roof. You are once more my charming young scholar, and Professor Moritz has just come to give Miss von Leuthen a lesson in the Italian language. Yes, that is it, we are still the same; and see! there lie the flowers on your table, just as they were when old Trude conducted me to your room to give you your first lesson."