Whenever there was a spare half hour, such as between where dinner ended and tea began, she would run out to the lime-trees, and pacing up and down that leafy place with the gooseberry bushes and vegetables and straggling accidental flowers of the garden lying hotly in the sun between her and the back of the house, she learned German words by heart. She learned them aloud from her grammar, saying them over and over again glibly, mechanically, while her thoughts danced about the future, from the immediate future of what she would do to-morrow, the future of an afternoon in the punt among the reeds and perhaps paddling along to where the forest began, to the more responsible vaguer future of further down the months, when, armed with German, she would begin among the poor and go out into the parish and make friends with the peasants and be a real pastor's wife. Particularly she wished to get nearer her mother-in-law. It seemed to her to be her first duty to get near her. Ceaselessly she trotted up and down repeating the German for giants, umbrellas, keys, spectacles, wax, fingers, thunder, beards, princes, boats, and shoulders. Ceaselessly her lips moved, while her eyes followed the movements of the birds darting in and out of the lilac hedge and hopping among the crumbs where breakfast had been; and through her giants, umbrellas, keys, spectacles, and wax she managed not to miss a word the yellow-hammers were chirping to each other in cheerful strophe and antistrophe: _A little bit of bread and no che-e-e-e-e-ese--a little bit of bread and no che-e-e-e-e-ese_. At four she would go in and make some coffee by the simple method of uniting the coffee to hot water and leaving them to settle down together on the mat outside the laboratory's locked door. Herr Dremmel did not wish to be disturbed once he was in there, and she would steal down the passage on tip-toe, biting her under-lip in the intentness of her care that no rattling of the things on the tray should reach his ears. When he was in the house all singing ceased. She arranged that Ilse should do her outdoor duties then--clean out the hen-house, milk the cow whether it wanted to be milked or not, and minister to the pig. Johann was away all day at the experiment ground, and Ilse waded about the farmyard mess with her bare legs, thoroughly enjoying herself, for no one ever scolded her whatever she did, and the yard was separated from the village street only by a low fence, and the early manhood of Kökensee, as it passed, could pause and lean on this and learn from her manner of solacing the pig the comfortableness of the solacements awaiting her husband.