Eleanore looked at the church tower whose Spanish-green roof rose from the valley. After a long silence she said: “I wonder whether it will be a boy or a girl, Gertrude’s baby? Oh, a girl, of course. Some day it will be in the world, and will look at me with eyes, with real eyes. How strange that a child of yours should look at me!” “What is there strange about that? Many children are born, many look at some one.” “What are you going to call it?” asked Eleanore. “If it is blond and has blue eyes like yours, I am going to call it Eva.” “Eva!” cried Eleanore, “no, that won’t do.” She herself had chosen the name of Eva for the child of the maid at the Rüdigers’. That he should now want to call Gertrude’s child by the same name seemed so strange to her. “Why not Eva?” he asked. “There is something back of this objection on your part. Women always have something up their sleeve. Out with it! Why do you object to Eva?” Eleanore smiled, and shook her head. She would have liked to make a clean confession to him, but she was not certain how he would take it: she was afraid he would turn back, enraged at her cunning. Once the child had been born and lay there before him, it would captivate him, and she knew it. They had stopped and were looking out over the sunlit plains. “How alone we are!” said Daniel. “Everything is easier here,” said Eleanore thoughtfully. “If one could only forget where one comes from, it would be easy to be happy.” III “I have been away for seven years,” said Daniel as they passed through the village gate. Everything seemed so ridiculously small—the Town Hall, the Church, the Market Place, and the Eschenbach Fountain. He had also pictured the houses and streets to himself as being cleaner and better kept. As he passed over the three steps at the front gate, each one of which was bulging out like a huge oyster shell, and entered the shop with its smell of spices, the past dwindled to nothing. Marian was so happy she could not speak. She reached one of her hands to Daniel, the other to Eleanore. Her first question was about Gertrude. In the room sat a four-year-old child with blond hair and marvellous blue eyes. Its little face was of the most delicate beauty, its body was delicately formed. “Who is the child? To whom does it belong?” asked Daniel. “It is your own child, Daniel,” said his mother. “My own child! Yes, for heaven’s sakes—!” He blushed, turned pale, looked first at his mother, and then at Eleanore. “It is your own flesh and blood. Don’t you ever think of Meta any more?” “Of Meta.... Oh, I see. And you, you adopted the child? And you, Eleanore, knew all about this? And you, Mother, took the child?” He sat down at the table, and covered his face with his hands. “That was what Eleanore had in mind?” he murmured timidly to himself. “And I presume that to make the story complete the child’s name is Eva ...?”