Innstetten was wholly devoted to his office and his home. He was happier than formerly in Kessin, because he could not fail to observe that Effi manifested more artlessness and cheerfulness. She could do so because she felt freer. True, the past still cast a shadow over her life, but it no longer worried her, or at least much more rarely and transiently, and all such after-effects served but to give her bearing a peculiar charm. In everything she did there was an element of sadness, of confession, so to speak, and it would have made her happy if she could have shown it still more plainly. But, of course, she dared not. When they made their calls, during the first weeks of April, the social season of the great city was not yet past, but it was about to end, so they were unable to share in it to any great extent. During the latter half of May it expired completely and they were more than ever happy to be able to meet at the noon hour in the Tiergarten, when Innstetten came from his office, or to take a walk in the afternoon to the garden of the Palace in Charlottenburg. As Effi walked up and down the long front, between the Palace and the orange trees, she studied time and again the many Roman emperors standing there, found a remarkable resemblance between Nero and Titus, gathered pine cones that had fallen from the trees, and then walked arm in arm with her husband toward the Spree till they came to the lonely Belvedere Palace. "They say this palace was also once haunted," she remarked. "No, merely ghostly apparitions." "That is the same thing." "Yes, sometimes," said Innstetten. "As a matter of fact, however, there is a difference. Ghostly apparitions are always artificial, or at least that is said to have been the case in the Belvedere, as Cousin von Briest told me only yesterday, but hauntings are never artificial; hauntings are natural." "So you do believe in them?" "Certainly I believe in them. There are such things. But I don't quite believe in those we had in Kessin. Has Johanna shown you her Chinaman yet?" "What Chinaman?" "Why, ours. Before she left our old house she pulled him off the back of the chair upstairs and put him in her purse. I caught a glimpse of him not long ago when she was changing a mark for me. She was embarrassed, but confessed." "Oh, Geert, you ought not to have told me that. Now there is such a thing in our house again." "Tell her to burn it up." "No, I don't want to; it would not do any good anyhow. But I will ask Roswitha--" "What? Oh, I understand, I can imagine what you are thinking of. You will ask her to buy a picture of a saint and put it also in the purse. Is that about it?" Effi nodded. "Well, do what you like, but do not tell anybody." * * * * *