The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing; if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation. Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long loved thee!...