The death of the old woman was another blow to Oswald. Again he had lost one of the few beings in whom he was interested. It seemed as if his troubled mind was never to have any peace--as if the last bright light was to fade on his sky, and deep night was to surround him on all sides. He had seen Mother Claus but rarely, and yet it had always been under such peculiar circumstances as to make in each case a deep and lasting impression on his mind; he felt as if he had lost an old relative, whose tender affections he had rewarded with indifference and ingratitude. When he was last at her hut with Albert, he had determined not to lose sight again of the old woman, to ask her if he could help her, to inquire if anything could be done for her. She had thought of him in her last hour, while he had not had a minute for her in all these days! She had wished to bless him before she died--what had he ever done to deserve such a blessing?--It was of little use now that he provided for her funeral, that he and Bruno accompanied her to her last resting-place when they carried the simple coffin on a farm wagon to the graveyard at Fashwitz. It was of no use that he wrote to Grunwald, ordering a small marble tablet, so that her grave might not be too soon obliterated. But he thought how she would have thanked him during her lifetime for the smallest part of all the trouble he took for her now that she was dead! Was it because he had not deserved it, that the blessing was not fulfilled? The peace which she had implored for him with the last breath of her lips would not come to his heart. Like a desperate man he struggled with the maddening passion which had overwhelmed him of a sudden like a fierce hurricane, but every day convinced him but more and more of his inability to resist. He spent daily several hours in the company of the beautiful girl; she met him with her kindly smile on her proud lips as soon as the bright summer morning had ended the short night, which yet to him seemed so long! At table he sat opposite to her; her lessons by his side, and a hundred other occasions, inevitable in so small a family at a country place, brought him again and again in contact with the lovely one. He himself called his passion not love, but friendship, deep interest--he tried to persuade himself that he would have felt the same friendship, the same interest, if his relations to Melitta had remained unchanged,--if accident had never revealed to him Melitta's image in a new light Oswald would have been the first to discover that it spoke neither of prudence nor of loyalty to make deceitful accident the judge of the weal or woe of a woman he loved so dearly, and that all these boastful reasonings were nothing more than cunning sophisms of a wild passion; he would have discovered this in any one else; but we lack only too frequently that prudence and loyalty in our own affairs which we always have ready for others, and