What she did regret was that, even when he came home to her, it was often with a clouded brow. He could not forget even in her presence the business of the day. She told herself that this was also quite natural; he must take more interest in these important and weighty matters than in her small joys and sorrows. Nevertheless, she felt a certain void in her life, which could not be filled either by her domestic occupations or by her intercourse with her parents or with Adela Hohenstein. Adela was friends with Alma again, and had promised to be very quiet and good; but it is to be feared that she was a sad romp still at heart. Thea laughed and gossiped with the girls, as she had always done, but somehow she did not seem really to belong to them any longer. Thus the winter passed, and Easter came again. Lothar and Walter both came to Eichhof at Bernhard's invitation, but the holidays were very different from those of the previous year. Lothar's debts amounted to such a sum that Bernhard, who now needed all his money for his improvements, declared that he would never again pay one penny for his brother, and would help him now only upon condition that he would have himself transferred from Berlin to his native province, where the cavalry regiments were scattered about in small garrisons and there was not so much opportunity to spend money. Willy-nilly, Lothar was obliged to agree to this condition, since he was utterly powerless to extricate himself from his financial embarrassments without his brother's aid, and was only too grateful to be helped out of a scrape once more. "I believe you are the only one who has any real compassion for me," said Lothar one day to Alma Rosen, with whom he had been left alone in his sister-in-law's boudoir. "You pity me, do you not?" "And so does Thea," Alma replied, a little embarrassed, as she always was with Lothar; "but then she is glad too, for she thinks that you will be near us--that is, near Eichhof--in your new garrison." "Well, yes, that would be the best thing that could happen to me," he said, smiling. "And Thea is glad? That's very good of her. You both have excellent hearts, you and Thea, but your father and mother, you know, look upon me as a terrible black sheep." Alma was silent, and looked out of the window. She could not deny the truth of his assertion, and she would not have admitted it for the world.