so that I might soon be with you again; and now, when I have learned enough to be able to repay you a very little for all that you have done and suffered for me, you refuse to let me fly to your dear arms, for fear of the miserable influence of your ward. Father, you will--you must--hear and heed me. The tears that blotted your last letter to me fell hot into my very soul. They were tears of longing--do not deny it--for your child, and I will never rest until you give heed to your own heart! Ah, father dear, you will be pleased when you see me! I am taller and stronger than our governess! Every one says I am very tall for my age--I might be taken for eighteen years old! When we go to walk together, you will have to give me your arm! Ah, what a delight that will be! I shall be too proud to touch the ground! and, depend upon it, I shall be able to do something with Ernestine! She never used to be cross to me as a child; I cannot think how she can have altered so. How could she become so changed with such a guardian? In spirit I kiss his dear, kind hands! Happy girl!--to have my father for a teacher! Shall I not grudge her a happiness of which she has proved herself so unworthy? Yes; I do grudge it her! I do not envy her for her talents or her wealth, but I do envy her for my father!--I must envy her for that! You give her your time--your care; you devote yourself to her, and let your own child grow up far away from you, among strangers,--your own child,--who would give all that she possesses for one look from her father's eyes!" Leuthold could read no further. He writhed like a worm on the ground beneath the weight of reproach with which this artless creature thus heaped him. The thunderbolt of a god could have inflicted no such punishment upon him as the pure, sweet, angelic love of his child. He sunk upon his knees, and kissed the letter again and again. "My child! my child!" he cried aloud, racked almost to madness by intense feverish longing. At this moment of weakness he was overwhelmed with remorse. He had banished from his side his dearest possession,--his Gretchen. And why? Because he loved her too dearly to expose her to contact with the ideas that he sought to impress upon the mind of his ward,--because he would not allow his child to breathe the poisoned atmosphere of falsehood in which he chose that Ernestine should dwell. And why had he thus chosen? Because, he loved Gretchen too much to have her always poor and dependent, because he determined to win back the inheritance that he had once thought his own, but which had been so unexpectedly lost to him, and because there was only one way, in his mind, in which this could be done,--by making the possessor of this inheritance so utterly unfit for the world that nothing might wrest her person or her property from his grasp.