"Good heavens!" said she to herself, "I seem to myself like a Delilah indeed. Seated at a rendezvous, at half past eight in the evening! At my time of life! How scandalized I should have been when I was a young girl, at the thought of such a thing, and to be doing it now in my old age! Bräsig! Don't sneeze so dreadfully! One might hear you a quarter of a mile off. And all this for that boy, for that miserable boy! God bless me, if my Pastor knew! Bräsig, what are you laughing at? I forbid you to laugh!" "I am not laughing, Frau Pastorin." "Yes, you were laughing: I distinctly heard you laugh." "I was merely yawning a little from weariness, Frau Pastorin." "And can you yawn, over such a matter as this? I am ready to fly, hand and foot. Ah, you miserable scamp! What have you made of me! And I can tell nobody, I must fight it out alone. Bräsig is a real godsend." By and by Bräsig spoke--in a whisper to be sure, but one could hear it as distinctly as the cry of the quail in the distance:--"Frau Pastorin, make yourself as long as Lewerenz's child, and as thin as possible, and put on a lovely, shamefaced mien, for he is coming over the hill, I can see him against the evening sky." And the little Frau Pastorin's heart throbbed, and her wrath rose high against the youth, and she glowed with shame at her own situation, and now she would certainly have run away, if Bräsig had not laughed again; but that provoked her, and she meant to show him that she was in earnest. This time, Bräsig really did laugh, for, behind the first dark figure that came over the hill he saw a second, and behind the second a third, and he chuckled to himself, behind his thorn-bush: "So! There is Karl Habermann, too; and now the whole inspectorship of Pumpelhagen is on foot, probably out to see how the peas look in the evening. This looks like a comedy!" The Frau Pastorin did not see the others, she saw merely her precious nephew, who came straight towards her. Now he ran across the bridge, now he ran along the bank of the ditch, now he sprang forward a couple of feet, and clasped his dear aunt about the waist: "Beloved angel!" "Wait, you rascal!" cried she in reply, and with the grip which Bräsig had taught her she seized him, not exactly by the throat, but by the coat-collar, and cried with a clear voice, "The Philistines be upon thee!" and Bräsig, the Philistine, scrambled up. Oh, thunder! his foot was asleep! but no matter! He hopped on one leg along the ditch, and almost sprang upon Fritz; but the overtasked leg failed under the weight of the hundred and eighty pounds it dragged after it; Bräsig fell backwards into a thorn-bush, lost his balance, and tumbled, a lump of misfortune, into the foot and a half of ditch-water.