—the big black eyes were wont to overflow, and her round brown cheeks grew wet with tears. She was always very silent, this Grete Halm, and you might have thought her dull; but she was so extraordinarily sensitive to emotional impressions, and there was such a mute, appealing look in her eyes for kindness and affection, that half the young men in the neighbourhood would have given their ears to be permitted to walk about with Grete, and go to church with her, and sing with her in the evening. There was the young schoolmaster, for example—everybody knew how he came to have that ugly mark on his nose the last time he came home from Göttingen, to undertake the tuition of his neighbours’ children. It was at a beer-drinking bout, and a few got tipsy; and one especially, Friedrich Schefer, disliking young Gersbach, came round to him, and said— "I see you have Margarethe Halm written on one of your books. If that is the name of your sweetheart, my friend Seidl says she is a rogue, and not to be trusted." "I challenge you," says Gersbach, calmly, but blinking fiercely through his spectacles. "Further, muthiger Herr Gersbach, my friend Seidl says your Margarethe Halm has half-a-dozen sweethearts, and that you give her money to buy presents for them." "You are a liar, Friedrich Schefer!" shouts Gersbach, starting to his feet; "and I challenge you, ’_ohne, ohne,_’"¹ ¹ The extended phrase is, "Ich fordere Ihnen auf, _ohne Mützen, ohne Secundanten_"—"I challenge you, _without either masks or seconds_." Such a challenge being given (and it is only given in cases of extreme provocation), the duellists fight without cessation until one of them is put _hors de combat_. So the next morning the meeting took place; and the unfortunate Gersbach, who had had little practice, and was slow of eye, suddenly received a blow which divided the under part of his nose from the upper. The wound was sewn up again on the spot; but when Gersbach came home he looked a hideous spectacle, and though he never spoke of it, it leaked out that the wound had been got in fighting about Margarethe Halm. Gersbach was a great friend of Hans Halm’s, and spent every evening in the inn chatting with the keepers, or reading Greek, and drinking white wine and water; but Grete showed him no particular favour, and he seemed rather sad. "Ach, Gott," said Margarethe to herself, as she stood in the stone courtyard; "if they should not come—and if my father should see me——" The next moment she caught sight of the two carriages coming along through the village; and her heart waxed a little faint as she saw that Hermann was sitting with a rosy young English girl by his side. "He never wrote to me anything about her," she thought, in those scrawled letters which always ended, "_Denke an mich, Gretchen; und mit herzlichsten Grüssen_," &c., &c.