The haste with which Franz pressed her had a very good motive in the illness of her father. Franz, as a physician, knew best that the life of the excellent man was hanging on a very slender thread. He had rallied quickly enough from a stroke of apoplexy, which had attacked him a fortnight ago, but several bad symptoms announced that another attack was not improbable, and with his nervous, very delicately-organized system, this was likely to be fatal. But if the father died before his daughter had been married, the poor girl would have been placed in a very painful position, as her mother had been dead for many years, and she had neither brothers and sisters nor any near relations. The world with its prejudices would have hardly been willing to admit that under such circumstances her only home should be in the house of the man whom she loved, but would have been inconceivably shocked if the daughter had married "before the shoes were worn out in which she had followed her father's funeral." The whole city would have broken out in one cry of indignation against such a fearful crime against decency and propriety. Sophie loved her father with a love which bordered upon enthusiasm, little as enthusiasm generally formed a part of her clear and sensible character, which shrank instinctively from all exaggeration. And the father was well worthy of such love. The privy councillor, Roban, was a man of rare distinction in many respects. As a man of science he stood very high; he was considered the very first pathologist in Germany. But a remarkable versatility of mind enabled him to gather, outside of the studies which his profession required, information upon the most varied fields of knowledge, and to attain to a high degree of perfection in more than one of the arts. In the morning he would take his pupils, hour after hour, from bed to bed in the hospital, and open to them views into the innermost workings of nature. Then again he would wander for long hours from house to house, soothing here a sufferer's pains, comforting others, and exhorting them to patient endurance. And yet in the evening, when a circle of intimate friends were gathered under his hospitable roof, he would be ready to take an active part in an animated conversation about art, literature, or politics, or perhaps take his favorite instrument, the violoncello, between his knees, and delight even the best cultivated ears by his correct and yet deeply-felt playing in a quickly-improvised quartette.