"Most certainly!" cried Leuthold with unwonted vivacity; "something must be made of her. In two years she will read Darwin." And he became lost in reverie. Heim plucked two pansies that were growing among the weeds, and handed them to Ernestine. "Don't trouble your little brain with such thoughts," he said with an attempt to laugh. "When you are grown up you can learn all you wish to know. How few flowers you have here! Not enough for a nosegay!" "No matter for that, Herr Heim," said Ernestine gaily. "Although there are so few flowers here, it seems to me as lovely as Paradise." "The child is imaginative," Heim observed to Leuthold. "She finds Paradise in a neglected kitchen-garden; there is poetry there." And he pointed to her head and heart. Leuthold took the child's hand. "If you wish for flowers, my darling, you shall have them. You are now"--and a spasmodic smile hovered upon his lips--"so rich that you need deny yourself nothing." "I am rich!" Ernestine repeated, as though she could not grasp the idea. "Does the chair in which I am sitting belong to me?" "Most certainly." "And this garden, and the fields?" "Everything that you see." "Oh, how delightful! But, uncle, have I money enough to buy me a telescope like yours?" Leuthold looked surprised at this question "Is that the end and aim of your desires? Well, then, you shall have a far better one than mine. You shall have an observatory, whence you can search the heavens far and wide, and, if you choose, I will be your teacher. Would you like that?" "Oh, uncle!" sighed Ernestine, "God is so kind to me--how shall I thank him for all he is giving me?" An ugly smile appeared on Leuthold's face; she looked up at him in surprise, and so fixedly that he involuntarily turned aside. It was strange! Why had her uncle smiled at those words. Was what she had said so stupid, then? Was he laughing at her, or at--what? Suddenly there was an alloy in her happiness, as if she had found an ugly worm in a fragrant rose or discovered a flaw in a clear mirror. A pang shot through her heart. Yes, little Kay in the story-book must have felt just so when a splinter of the evil mirror got into his eye and heart and nothing seemed perfect or stainless to him any more. Instinctively she looked up into the sky, as if to see the demon flying there with the mysterious mirror that cast scorn and contempt upon the works of the good God; and when she glanced again at her uncle, who had just smiled so disagreeably, he seemed to her to look as she had fancied an evil spirit must look, and she shrank from him in a way that she could not herself comprehend. She leaned back in her chair exhausted, to rest after all these wearisome thoughts that had chased one another through her brain, and Heim, observing this, took Leuthold aside; she heard him say, "Come, we will leave the child to take a little sleep."