The unusual friendliness of her manner took him by surprise, and stopped the reproaches that had been ready on his lips. "How does the gallery get on?" he asked, instead of answering. "You will have been standing chattering there so long, that there will not have been much work done." "I left the gallery about twelve o'clock;" she said with a faint blush. "If I had not gone astray among the woods, and done that business on my way back, I should have been here ever so long ago. After all, it would not so much signify, if the work were to last a few days longer. The grounds are hardly planned, and the gallery will certainly be finished in a week. Have you heard whether that assistant is to be counted on?" "Not yet, why do you ask?" She took a chair and seated herself with her back to the light. "I will tell you why," she said. "I have been thinking over what you said the other day, and I begin to see that you were right, when you said it was time for Walter to be sent from home; I know him too well, not to see that for him, it would be waste of time and talents, to go on plodding as he is doing now, in this narrow sphere of action. If he is ever to attain the fall development of which he is capable, we must transplant him to a more congenial soil. However, I am aware that you would find it hard to keep him in a strange place, unless he were to earn his own livelihood by his present trade; and that would be hard on him, for he takes no pleasure in it, and will take still less, if you send him among strangers." She paused, for her voice was failing her; he stood at the other window, looking away from her, and drawing upon the vapoury panes with his finger. "Brother-in-law," she began again: "I have just done a thing without your knowledge, that I hope you will approve of, as it is for Walter's good. As I was walking home just now, I thought over all those long years we have lived together, and I confess I have not been so friendly with you as I should have been, to make our lives pleasanter to both. I am sorry for it now. There were some things I never could forget, although they were past and over, and we know that no one human being has any right to judge another. "With regard to Walter, I have not so much to reproach myself. I did my duty by him, as far as I saw it; and I see that I would not be doing it now, if I were to keep him at home, merely because I find it hard to part from him. So it occurred to me, as the best plan for us all, that I could give him an independence, by making him my heir, as a mother should her only son. Don't mistake me, I am not thinking of dying--only of making my will; and as women are ignorant in such matters, as soon as I had made up my mind, I went straight to the proper authority, Dr. Hansen, and asked him what would be the surest way of making a will--not only with a sound mind, but a sound body--and of laying down the burthen of one's thalers in the most legal form." "You spoke to Hansen about this?"