It was afternoon, and Oswald was sitting at his writing-table, which he had only left to share a very silent dinner with Albert and Margerite, when a servant brought him a note. Oswald had, since he lived at Grenwitz, received so few letters that he was quite surprised, and asked the bearer from whom it came. "From Baron Oldenburg," was the answer, "and the baron's carriage is at the door." Oswald opened the note. It ran thus: "Dear friend! If you can get rid of the studious boys, and have nothing better to do, I wish you would come and keep a lonely hypochondriac company for a few hours, and convince yourself, at the same time, how well the little heath flower has borne the transplanting into a strange soil. My coachman brings you this. He has orders to return with you or upon you. You may choose! Your Oldenburg." Oswald hesitated what he should do. With the sunshine his longing for Melitta had returned. He could not comprehend how he could have let three days pass without making an attempt to see her. And yet he was reluctant to take the first step towards a reconciliation, although he knew that the cloud conjured up by the scene in the ball-room had long since disappeared, and that he had himself repented a thousand times his grievous wrong. We all know the contradictions in which so young a heart is apt to lose itself when pride and love contend for the mastery! And Oswald's proud heart had to beat many years yet before it learnt true love, which the Bible knows under the beautiful image of Charity, that beareth all things and believeth all things. True love can live only in hearts that have lived much and suffered much, as the sweetest and most highly prized fruits hang on those trees which the autumnal winds begin to strip of their summer dress of rich leaves. Oswald took a sheet of paper to write the baron, that he could not accept his invitation, but the next moment he had taken up his hat and run down. The same elegant light wagon in which the baron had brought him back from Barnewitz, with the two fiery black horses, was at the door. The coachman, a handsome young man with an immense beard, smiled when he saw him, remembering the liberal fee he had received on that evening. As he got in, Albert called out over the garden wall: "Can you take me with you, _Monsieur le docteur_?" "Not very well!" said Oswald. "Well, then, go alone!" said Albert; "to the devil," he added, as the carriage rolled away. "You are right, Marguerite," he said to the little Frenchwoman, who now came out of the shrubbery in which she had hid from Oswald, "the doctor is really a _fat_, as you say, and I shall soon be near hating him."