She shone with the same brilliance and calm on all Europe--on the poor, tumultuous city of Paris where so many dead still lay unburied and so many wounded wrestled with death, and on the tiny town of Neustadt in its wide, peaceful valley. She glanced softly into the over-crowded hospitals and morgues;--she glanced softly into the traveling-coach of Charles X. and not less softly into the low chamber in which lay Christine Unwirrsch with her boy. The child slept, but the mother lay awake and could not sleep for thinking of what she had heard when she came home so tired after her hard work. It had taken her a long time to understand the confused report that Hans and Auntie Schlotterbeck had given; she was a simple woman who needed time before she could grasp anything that lay beyond her daily work and her poor household. To be sure, when once she did understand a thing she could analyze it properly and intelligently and consider and weigh the pros and cons of every detail; but she could scarcely understand in its broadest outlines this, her child's, aspiration out of the darkness toward the light. [Illustration: THE COMMANDER OF THE FORTRESS _Permission Franz Hanfstaengl_ KARL SPITZWEG] She only knew that in this child the same hunger had now made itself apparent, from which her Anton had suffered, that hunger which she did not understand and for which she nevertheless had such respect, that hunger which had so tormented her beloved, sainted husband, the hunger for books and for the marvelous things which lay hidden in them. The years which had passed since her husband had been carried to the grave had not blurred a single remembrance. In the heart and mind of the quiet woman the good man still lived with all his peculiarities, even the smallest and most insignificant of which death had transfigured and transformed into a good quality. How he paused in his work to gaze for minutes into the glass globe in front of his lamp in self-forgetfulness, how on his walks, on a beautiful holiday, he would suddenly stand still and look at the ground and at the blue dome above, how at night he woke and sat awake for hours in bed, murmuring unconnected words--all that was not, and never could be, forgotten. How the good man had toiled on at his trade between sighs and flushes of joy, cheerful and depressed moods,--how in his rare leisure hours he had studied so hard and, above all, what hopes he had set on his son and with what wonderful aspirations he had dreamt of this son's future--all lay clear before Christine Unwirrsch's soul.