Thus in a day or two Violande made her formal entrance into the widower's house, and had sense enough to take the place of the dead wife at the hearth with judicious modesty and not without a spice of sentimentality, the reflection no doubt occurring to her that here she was at last, after long wanderings, where the desires of her first youth seemed at last on the point of being realized. Without undue elation she opened the closets and presses of her predecessor, examining in detail their contents: linen and homespun cloth piled up in orderly rows, and provisions of every kind arranged for instant or occasional use, such as preserved fruit, vegetables, mushrooms, stored away in carefully tied-up pots; many flitches of bacon and salted beef and pork, smoked hams and potted venison, and hundreds of bunches of flax hung up to dry under the ceilings of the roof. Her heart beat at a more lively gait when inspecting all these domestic riches speaking so eloquently of the forester's easy circumstances, and almost tenderly she handled these hundreds of vessels and receptacles, dreaming of a near housewifely future. And in this peaceable frame of mind she remained for a number of weeks. But then her old restlessness seized her again. It had to find a vent. And so she began to turn everything topsy-turvy, starting with the pots and kettles, each of which she assigned to a new place, mingling the big and little, shoving about the bolts of linen and cloth, entangling the flax carded and uncarded, and when she finally had done all this she had also managed to seriously interfere with human affairs in the house, upsetting them as much as she dared. Since it was her design to become, after all, the forester's wife, so as to acquire a more dignified and assured position in life, it became clear to her that what above all would be necessary was to part permanently Kuengolt and Dietegen, as to whose inclination for each other she had soon satisfied herself. For she argued quite correctly that Dietegen, once he married Kuengolt, would doubtless become the forester's successor, and thus not only remain permanently in the house, but that in that case the forester himself, in view of his strong affection for the memory of his departed wife, would never wed again. But, she reasoned, if both the children in some way could be made to shun the house, it would be much more likely that the forester would marry again, feeling lonesome all by himself.