"My dear child,--I may henceforth with good right call you so, since Fate gives me one opportunity after another, to prove myself a good, and, I hope, also a thoughtful, father to you. But an hour ago I had to calm and comfort my beloved child, and yet dared not give her true comfort, dared not express my full and firm conviction that a good, upright heart always makes choice of the right thing at once. For good and upright as my dear child's heart is, yet it is a very defiant heart too, and would rather be miserable in its own way, than happy and blessed in other people's way; and it would have steeled itself against my persuasion and against my testimony, and would again and again have reverted to this: You do not know him! But now I say to you: I do know him; and you must accept my testimony as that of a man of great experience and knowledge of the human heart, of a man whose eyes--sharp as human eyes go--love for you and care for your welfare have filled with divine perspicuity. I know him now, after one hour spent here in my room in confidential conversation, as though I had known him from childhood, stalwart young man as he is; and even as I sit writing this, he is sleeping, under my watchful care, the sweet sleep of exhausted youthful vigour, notwithstanding his painful anxieties and the bitter sorrow of his heart. I have been watching him in his sleep. Sleep is a terrible betrayer of narrow minds and feeble hearts. Here there is nothing to betray, and sleep can but put its soft yet sure seal upon the beauteous image of a great and noble soul. And even as this soul, helpless and resistless as it were, is in my keeping, receive it, loved one, from my hands, as a great and glorious gift of the gods on high, who have deemed me worthy to be their envoy and the executor of their sacred decision. "I promised you not to leave as long as you had need of me. You need me no longer, and I shall leave in the morning without bidding you farewell. From your mother, too, I shall take leave in writing; she knows my weakness for vanishing noiselessly from society. It is a long journey that lies before me, and we shall not soon meet again. Separation is death for a time, and time, again, is nought but a tiny speck, and its complement is eternity. A noble human being should plan his thoughts and action not in reference to the former, but the latter. Let, therefore, what I now say to you, for the brief space wherein we shall not behold one another, be said for evermore: Fare thee well, _Lebe wohl!_ that is, live according to the bidding of your heart, as you hear it when you listen to it in secret silence and reverence! Howsoever this our life may be shaped, it is no longer our concern, but that of the powers on high, over whom we have no influence, and therefore it matters nothing to us. Once more then: _Lebe wohl!_