Hannah Gropphusen sank back again languidly. For the third time she stretched out her hand to Reimers: "It rejoices me to find that such people still exist, and to know one of them!" Reimers had held her hand for a moment in his own. It was a small hand, almost too thin, with slender fingers. As he looked at it, he was reminded of the gentle hands of his mother. He respectfully touched the beautiful fingers with his lips and rose. Frau von Gropphusen made no effort to detain him. "It is perhaps better for me," she said wearily; and as he reached the door, she added: "But it has given me great pleasure to see you again," and she dismissed him with a friendly nod. Reimers stood for a moment before the front door, thoughtfully buttoning his gloves. It was certainly odd; the very woman whom every one else seemed to distrust appeared to him more worthy of esteem than any of the others. He realised this only after the visit just paid. To her alone had he answered frankly, and although they had hardly exchanged a dozen words, he felt they under-stood each other perfectly. He could not avoid the thought that their souls were akin. Each of them yearned after what was great and beautiful in life. This woman, indeed, deserved pity, for she had suffered shipwreck in the greatest and noblest end for which woman is created--in her love; but he, thank God, was a man; and his ideal, Germany, still stood out clear and definite, dwarfing mere personal aims. In that dim room a sinister thought had seized upon him, oppressing and paralysing him; a vague foreboding that his fate would resemble that of this pale woman. But he chased the dark clouds away. His star did not vary in its light as does the shifting and drifting human mind; it was like the sun, steady, unchangeable, inspiring. CHAPTER IV "For oh! I had a comrade, And a better could not be." (_Uhland._) During the first days of December Corporal Wiegandt would sometimes observe, in a pause of the drill, that the recruits were beginning to look a little like soldiers; and in the bar-rack-room, after drill was over, he occasionally even went so far as to give them some praise. When he was getting ready to go out in the evening, and, with sabre buckled on and forage-cap stuck jauntily on his head, brushed his moustache before the little looking-glass, he would say: "Boys, I am almost pleased with you to-day. I shall tell my Frieda."