Hermann has taken more pleasure in unpacking his master's trunks than in packing them on that melancholy day. Oldenburg thinks no longer of leaving, since Melitta has asked him to stay, and the house at Berkow holds everything that is dear to his heart. Every day towards dark his sleigh jingles its bells in the courtyard of Berkow, and the young widow often appears on the threshold to welcome her daily visitor. Since the evening on which his child had been restored to him, Oldenburg has become more cheerful than he has ever been. He seems to have taken to heart Melitta's words--that it would be best to bear in patience what must be borne. He knows perfectly well what the beloved one had meant; he knows why she cannot yet look straight into his eyes with her own dear, sweet eyes. He is sorry it should be so; but he, who knows Melitta's noble soul better than anybody else, would have wondered most if it had been otherwise. Melitta no longer loves the man who had conquered her heart in an unguarded hour and in a storm of passion, but the wound which the joy and the sorrow of this love has inflicted on her heart is still bleeding, and here also time must do what reasoning cannot accomplish. The peculiar situation in which Oldenburg stands to Melitta is no doubt of great influence, for the time, on his whole manner of thinking and of feeling. He has laid aside the plans for the improvement of the world, which he formerly cherished, as impracticable, since he has found that he will have need of all his patience, prudence, and caution to steer the vessel that bears his own fortune, safely into port. He is all the more interested now in the management of his estates, and follows the politics of the day with unwearied interest. He regrets, when the representatives of his province hold their annual meeting, that he has dreamt away on the banks of the Nile the time which he owed to his country. Now it seems to him more important to discover new sources of public prosperity than those of the Nile. He perceives in his solitude the first traces of that revolution which is not only threatening in France, but which will unchain at the first outbreak the fearful thunderstorm that is now hanging gloomily over his own country. Melitta takes a lively interest in all his hopes and fears, his wishes and plans, even in his impatience for the speedy coming of the hour which he feels must come. She understands it perfectly well that he wants to go to Paris in order to exchange his new views with his old friends there. He knows that this time she does not wish him away, but only thinks of himself, and on this account he decides to go.