Even when taking leaving of Rosenbusch she had shown herself strong. She felt it her duty not to make heavy her parting lover's heart, but to give him, in her own person, an example of the way one should sacrifice one's dearest wishes on the altar of the fatherland, with smiling magnanimity. But this "_P[oe]te, non dolet_" revenged itself upon her. Scarcely was she alone, when she reproached herself for having pretended an unwomanly hardness and severity that was calculated to frighten away her sensitive friend, rather than to bring him nearer to her. She immediately wrote him a long letter, in which, for the first time, she confessed her great love for him without reserve; beseeching him in the most moving terms not to expose his life recklessly, sending him all her prescriptions for rheumatism and chafed feet, and entreating him to write to her at least once a week. These weekly letters of his were now the only thing for which she seemed to live, aside from the mere mechanical activity with which she devoted herself to works of charity in the women's societies and on her own account. She never appeared among her friends except on those occasions when she had just received one of these letters from the front, and then she came running to old Schoepf, her cheeks glowing with joy, to tell him the latest news about Rosenbusch and Elfinger, and to have pointed out to her, on the special map that Rossel had given the old man, the exact spot where her lover must now be. But for everything else she showed but slight interest, just as she seemed to have completely lost her humor. She was only amusing when she came to speak about the _francs tireurs_ and the treachery of the native inhabitants, by whom she was perpetually imagining her lover attacked, plundered, maltreated, or even killed, in spite of the red cross which she had made and sewed on his coat-sleeve with her own hands. On these occasions she indulged in such droll maledictions upon the Gallic national character, and recounted such incredible instances of her own cowardice and ghost-seeing, especially at night, that she finally had to join in with the laughter of the others, going home again with her heart somewhat lightened. During all this war time she did not touch a brush. As nobody cared for flower pictures, it was evidently a saving for her to cut up her canvas and make use of it for sewing purposes, rather than to waste oil colors on it.