For, while a country pastor who enters his pulpit every Sunday for twenty years usually lets his spiritual armor grow tolerably rusty with the flight of time, this admirable man, in his quiet gable-room, had taken the most eager interest in all the struggles which in those days agitated the theological world, had entered deeply into the historical investigations of the Tuebingen School, and instantly fanned to a bright blaze the scientific interest which, during my rage for the theater in Berlin, had become completely extinguished--a blaze, it is true, that consumed to a sorry little heap the last scraps of orthodoxy with which I had covered my nakedness. This is not the place to enter more fully into this spiritual question now struggling in the pangs of its birth. Only I must say that I looked up with actual reverence to this man who, from the depths of his warm, thoroughly evangelical nature, drew the strength--spite of casting aside the dogmatic traditions, whose foundations had been shaken in his soul--to beneficently fulfill his duties as pastor and proclaim the Word, without being faithless to its spirit. I was not granted this gift, rooted in the purest philanthropy, and therefore capable of helping each individual to salvation in his own way. I was exclusively occupied with my own redemption, and, as I had entirely relinquished the idea of a parish, and for the present gave myself no anxiety about any other profession, I spent these three years, so far as my secret yearnings for my lost love permitted, very happily, and daily passed several hours with my teacher and friend, who treated me like a younger brother, and let me share without reserve everything that occupied his mind. It was inevitable that I should be on the most familiar terms with his children also. From the first I had placed myself on a footing of merry banter, and asked the little girls to call me Uncle Hans. Marie persisted in addressing me as Herr Johannes. Yet an innocent familiarity, like that of blood relations, existed between us, and seemed to continue undisturbed when the child had matured into a maiden, and the eyes of the girl of nineteen gazed into the world with a dreamy earnestness that would have given a person better versed than I in reading the human heart much food for thought. I noticed that she had lost some of her former vivacity, but was so unsuspicious that I jested with her about it, and drew no inference from her silence and blushes. True, the idea occurred to me that the young bird was fledged and longed to quit the overcrowded nest. But, as I knew with whom she associated, and that none of my employer's guests, who sometimes visited her father, had made the slightest impression upon her, I ascribed her changed demeanor to some anxiety of conscience--she often rummaged among her father's books--rather than any affair of the heart.