When he was gone the young couple sat down, discouraged and out of spirits, among the wilderness of stone. They let their hands drop and hung their poor heads too. For the sudden appearance of the vagrant fiddler had wiped out the happy memories of their childhood, and their joyous mood in which they, like they used in their younger days, had wandered about in the green and among the corn, had gone with him. They sat once more on the hard soil of their misery, and the happy gleam of childhood had vanished, and their minds were oppressed and darkened. But all at once Vreni remembered the fiddler's nose, and his whole odd figure, and she burst out laughing loud and merry. She exclaimed: "The poor fellow surely looks too queer. What a nose he had!" And with that a charmingly careless merriment flashed out of her brown eyes, just as though she had only been waiting for the fiddler's nose to chase away all the sad clouds from her mind. Sali, too, regarded the girl, and noticed this sunny gaiety. But by that time Vreni had already forgotten the immediate cause of her gleefulness, and now she laughed on her own account into Sali's face. Sali, dazed and astonished, involuntarily gazed at the girl with laughing mouth, like a hungry man who suddenly is offered sweetened wheat bread, and he said: "Heavens, Vreni, how pretty you are!" And Vreni, for sole answer, laughed but the more, and out of the mere enjoyment of her sweet temper she gurgled a few melodious notes that sounded to the boy like the warblings of a nightingale. "Oh, you little witch," he exclaimed enraptured, "where have you learned such tricks? What sorcery are you applying to me?" "Sorcery?" she murmured astonished, in a voice of sweet enchantment, and she seized Sali's hand anew. "There's no sorcery about this. How gladly I should have laughed now and then, with reason or without. Now and then, indeed, all by myself, I have laughed a bit, because I couldn't help it, but my heart was not in it. But now it's different. Now I should like to laugh all the time, holding your hand and feeling happy. I should like to hold your hand forever, and look into your eyes. Do you too love me a little bit?" "Ah, Vreni," he answered, and looked full and affectionately into her eyes, "I never cared for any girl before. And I have never until now taken a good look at another girl. It always seemed to me as though some time or other I should have to love you, and without knowing it, I think, you have always been in my thoughts."