"Pardon me, dear Alma; I forgot you were not accustomed to the noise. It is not always so bad; but since Stine left me day before yesterday--dear me, I can't blame her; the good old thing wants to get married, and to a young man who might almost be her son, so she certainly has no time to lose. She has gone back to her parents. The wedding will take place in a fortnight. It was hard enough for her to leave the children--" "You were going to send the children away, dear!" The children were sent away. Alma Sellien leaned back in the corner of the sofa exhausted, and said, closing her soft blue eyes as it half asleep: "I am sure this will be another disappointment." "What, dear Alma?" asked Frau Wollnow, whose thoughts were still with her children. "My husband is so terribly enthusiastic about him; he's always enthusiastic about men I afterwards think horrible." "You will be mistaken this time," cried Frau Wollnow, who, engrossed in this interesting subject, even failed to hear her youngest child crying upon the stairs; "your husband has said too little rather than too much. He is not only a handsome man--which, for my part, I consider of very little consequence--tall, and of an extremely elegant, graceful bearing, which harmonizes most admirably with the gentle, yet resolute expression of his features, the mild, yet steady gaze of his large deep-blue eyes, and even the soft, but sonorous tone of his voice." "You are surely turning poetess," said Alma. Ottilie Wollnow blushed to the roots of the curly bluish-black hair on her temples. "I don't deny that I am very, very--" "Much in love with him," said Alma, completing the sentence. "Why yes, if you choose to say so; that is, as I love everything good and beautiful." "An excellent theory, which I profess myself, only unfortunately in practice we must always be withheld by the opposition of our husbands. Yours did not seem to be quite so much delighted with your protege." "My good Emil!" said Frau Wollnow, "we don't agree in a great many things, and, dear me, it is certainly no wonder; he has been obliged to work so hard all his life, that it has made him a little grave and pedantic; but he is a thoroughly good man, and in this case you are entirely mistaken; at heart he is even more interested in Gotthold than I, or, if that is saying too much, quite as much so." "It did not seem so."