"My child, that's very evident. We can't strike our tent in winter and travel fifty miles toward the south, with your poorly patched lungs, especially as we don't know how the climate there will suit you. Ah! if the tun could be packed up just as it stands, and sent as freight, marked 'glass, this side up with care--!'" They were both silent for a time. Balder held the letter from the faculty in his hand and seemed to be reading it again. The prize essay was mentioned in the most flattering terms, its special merits dwelt upon, and a private letter added from the dean, in which he emphasized the wish to obtain such promising young talent for the university. Edwin had gone to his desk and was beginning to cut a pen. "Are you still studying the letter, child?" he asked carelessly. "They write in a very pleasant style in that neighborhood, don't they? Well, we will do ourselves credit too." "Does _she_ know it yet?" asked Balder, without looking up. "She? What are you thinking about? I haven't seen her for a fortnight. Besides, what interest would she take in it? It'll be time enough to tell her when I make my next visit, and she won't even be curious about the prize essay. Such a duchess!" Balder quietly rose, laid the letter on the table and said: "You'll not hurt my feelings by refusing this, Edwin. I can spend the winter here if necessary and join you in the spring. You know what excellent care I shall have in your absence, and I shall never be really well again. But the most important thing is to first talk the matter over with her. There's no obstacle in the way now." "Child!" exclaimed Edwin, throwing aside his pen, "do you want to drive me mad--that you represent as possible things, which once for all--But no, it's folly to even speak of it seriously. Come, let's eat our dinner, I hear them bringing it and since the knowledge has come to me that we possess fifty ducats, I feel as hungry as a millionaire--or no, millionaires are never hungry--I'm hungry as a man who has never seen fifty ducats at once in his whole life." The door opened. But instead of the maid-servant who usually brought the dinner, little Jean entered, his round face with its staring blue eyes half buried in the high collar of a thick pilot-cloth coat, his hair carefully brushed, and his cheeks as red as Borsdorf apples from exposure to the sharp east wind. He held in his hand a paper horn, from which he awakwardly drew a bouquet of violets. "I'm to give this to the sick gentleman," he said in his automatic falsetto voice, "and my young lady wishes to know how he is." Balder took the bouquet from his hand. "Say that I'm very well, and that my brother will call himself this afternoon to express my thanks for the beautiful flowers. And here--" he felt in his pocket and took out the last thaler he possessed--"you've had to come up these steep stairs so often--" The boy retreated a step. "My mistress forbid me to take anything."