* * * As a young man, the dean with an ardent temperament and talent for oratory, had wished to study for the ministry; his parents, people of wealth, had been against it; they would have preferred to see him choose what they called an independent position; but their opposition served only to increase his zeal, and when he had graduated, he went abroad to study further. During a preliminary stay in Denmark, he used often to meet a lady, who belonged to a religious sect not sufficiently strict for him, and to whom he was therefore opposed: he sought continually to influence her, but the way in which she looked at him, thereby bringing him to silence, he could never forget during the whole of his sojourn on the continent. When he returned, he at once visited her. They had a good deal of intercourse, and grew in intimacy, till at last they became engaged, and were soon after married. And now it was evident that each of them had their own private thoughts; he had purposed to draw her over with all her simple grace, to his gloomy teaching, and she had been so innocently certain of being able to win his power and eloquence over to the service of her church. His first most cautious attempt was met by her first most cautious:--he drew back, disappointed, mistrustful. She saw it at once, and from that day he watched for her next attempt, while she did the same for his. But neither of them tried it again, for both had become afraid: he was afraid of his own passionate nature, and she, lest by a vain attempt, she might spoil her opportunity of influencing him; for she never gave up hope,--she had made it the aim of her life. But it never came to a conflict; for where she was, such could not be; yet to his active will, his repressed emotions, he must give vent, and so it happened every time he entered the pulpit and saw her seated below. The members of his church were drawn in with him as in a whirlwind, he excited them, and soon they him. She saw it, and sought to give rest to her foreboding heart in deeds of benevolence,----and later, when she became a mother, in the daughter, on whom she lavished her tenderness, physical and mental, and bore her to her quiet hours. There she gave, there she took, there in the child's innocence, she watched over her own great child, there she held the feast of love, and from there she returned to him in his strictness, with the united mildness of a woman and a Christian;--it was impossible for him to say anything that could wound her then. He might indeed love her above all else on earth, but he grew more sorrowful, the more he became convinced that he could not help her in the matter of her salvation. With a mother's quiet right, she withdrew the child also from his religious instruction; the child's songs, the child's questions soon became a new and deep source of pain to him,--and now when his violent agitation had excited him to hardness