Bemperlein was soon even fonder of Miss Roban than he had been of Frau von Berkow. The latter remained, with all her kindness and goodness, after all, the great lady, the benefactress, the mistress; and the impression she had made upon him when he, a poor, bashful, awkward candidate for the ministry, had arrived one summer afternoon at Berkow, and been presented by old Baumann to the great lady, had never been wholly effaced in the seven long years which he had spent at her house. But Sophie was not grand; she laughed as heartily as any one of them; she looked at him so trustingly with her big, blue eyes; she made no pretensions; you could speak to her as to an equal, you could love her like a brother, without being all the time filled with awe and reverence. And such paternal love Bemperlein felt for the hearty girl. Even if she had not been already engaged, it would never have occurred to him to fall in love with her. But to sympathize with all that interested her; to declare that her betrothed, whose acquaintance he made soon afterwards, was the most amiable and excellent of men; to render her any service which he could read in her eyes, and, when the privy councillor was ill, to watch with her till Franz should come back, day and night, with womanly patience and tenderness, by the bedside of the sufferer; and now, when he heard that the latter was better, to rejoice like a child to whom a father is restored, and to conceal this joy under a hundred innocent tricks and teasings--that was in the power of the ex-candidate of divinity and actual student of philosophy, Mr. Anastasius Bemperlein. * * * * * "I fear the potatoes are cold," said Sophie, raising the cover off the dish. "Then they have exactly the temperature of this fish," said Franz, presenting her his dish. "Or of this sauce," said Bemperlein, handing her the sauce-dish from the other side. Sophie shrugged her shoulders. "Nothing is eaten quite as warm as it is cooked, gentlemen. I must know that best, as future housewife!" "For we are to be married in four weeks from to-day, Bemperlein," said Franz; "that is to say, if your dress-coat, which you have intended to order ever since you first came to Grunwald, can be ready by that time, Bemperlein, otherwise it cannot be." "The coat shall be ready! The coat shall be ready!" cried Mr. Bemperlein; "even if I have myself to cut it out, to sew it, and to press it." "That would make a nice coat, Bemperlein." "Not so bad, perhaps, as you think. At all events it would not be the first dress-coat I have made with my own hands." "Impossible, Bemperlein!" cried Franz, with amazement. "As I tell you. It is a long time since, to be sure--perhaps fifteen years; and I was, during that Robinson Crusoe period of my life, much more inventive and industrious than I am now; but still I do not think I should find it impossible even now." "But how did you come to make such a funny experiment?"