She grew pale and fell back on a chair. We feared that she would faint. Bertha rushed to her aid, but she speedily recovered herself, and her trembling lips were the only sign, of the emotion she had passed through. She did not tell us why she had found it so wrong of them to send Ernst on that errand. She accompanied Bertha to her room, and stroking the light locks of little Victor, whom she had taken on her lap, said, "He looked just as you do when he was a little boy, except that he had blue eyes." "Yes," said Bertha, "my husband has often noticed that Victor bears great resemblance to Ernst." "And Uncle Ernst promised me a horse," said Victor. "Did he?" said my wife, with pleased looks: "If he did that, it is all right, but sad enough for all. Still, others have their burdens to bear as well as we." Martella's first meeting with Bertha as well as with Annette, resulted in mutual attraction. Bertha was obliged to tell Martella all that she knew about Ernst, and while she was holding the hand of the strange child, the latter must have felt a consciousness of the candor and straightforwardness of Bertha's character, for she looked into her face with sparkling eyes. Martella asked Bertha whether Ernst had sent the broken ring by her. Bertha said he had not. She removed a ring from her finger and offered it to Martella, who declined it. When Annette offered both her hands to Martella, and said that she had for a long while been anxious to make her acquaintance, Martella was quite confused, and looked down towards the ground. When she raised her head, her eyes fell on a light green necktie which Annette wore. "How pretty it is!" were her first words. Annette immediately removed the tie, and fastened it about Martella's neck. "It is quite warm, yet," said Martella; and Annette replied, "How lovely! Let us regard that as a good omen." When Bertha, who rarely gave way to sentiment, returned and joined us again, she said, "Let us now be thrice as kind and loving to one another as we have been, and be indulgent with each other's moods. It is only by such means that we can manage to live through these terrible times." Bertha and her daughter Clotilde, a charming, graceful child about nine years of age, were so clever in anticipating every wish of my wife's, that, although it had always been her wont to be serving others and providing for their comfort, she was now obliged to let them have their own way. Martella seemed almost inseparable from Rothfuss, and Victor was always with the two. He accompanied them out to the fields and into the woods; and it was difficult to say which of the two was the happier, Rothfuss the old, or Victor the young, child. It would have been difficult also to say which of the two, Victor or Martella, cut wilder capers, for the young play-fellow with the soldier cap seemed to make her forget all her trouble. She was quite proud of her skill in leaping, and loved to display it.