did. Be it so: I must make myself necessary to him, and I believed I

could do this: and then let the fair Hermine treat me as superciliously as she pleased, I stood firmly on my feet and could hold my head as high as nature had placed it.

So I strode valiantly along the narrow path to the gap in the alder thicket which here grew between the moor and the heath; the same gap through which I had fled with the Wild Zehren on that night nine years before. Once more I battled with my sad recollections, for I had firmly resolved to meet the present as it was, and let the past be past. How, indeed, without this resolution, could I ever have brought myself to return to this place? And the sun was shining so brightly in the blue sky, and the birds singing so merrily in the branches whose buds were now beginning to open, and in the bushes that were now in full leaf; in the brown water of the ditches and pools long-legged water-beetles were gaily rowing about, and in the distance, in the Trantowitz woods apparently, resounded the call of the cuckoo. No; one could not be melancholy on so bright a day; and when I thought of the pretty angry face of the charming girl, I could not refrain from laughing so loud that a man, who had been lying asleep in the young grass on the edge of a trench under the overhanging boughs of an alder a few paces from me, raised himself slowly on his elbow and stared at me, as I came round the thicket, with great astonished blue eyes. I only needed one look at these good-natured big blue eyes--"Herr von Trantow!" I cried--"Hans, my dear Hans!" and I held out my hands to my old friend, who in the meantime had risen to his feet, and offered me his great brown knightly hand with a friendly smile.

"How are you dear friend?" I said.

"As usual," he answered.

It was the old tone, but it was no longer the old Hans. His blue eyes were more expressionless, his brown cheeks sunken, and his formerly well-shaped handsome nose was red and swollen; and when we seated ourselves side by side on the edge of the trench, and he took off his cap, I saw that his thick dark-blond hair was greatly thinned.

"I knew that you would come," he said, taking flint and steel from his hunting pouch and lighting a cigar, after first supplying me: "I was to go there to dinner to-day, but I do not know whether I should have gone; so I am all the more glad that I have met you here. I had much rather be here."

And he puffed great clouds of smoke from his cigar and gazed at the water in the trench, where the lively long-legged water-beetles were busily rowing about.

"Much rather," he repeated.

"And are you still living as lonely as ever?" I asked.

"Naturally," said Hans.

"I do not find that so natural," I replied, with some animation, for Hans's whole appearance and voice bespoke a carelessness and desolation which cut me to the heart--"by no means natural. What! a man like you, a dear, good, brave fellow like you, go mooning and wasting his life in solitude because a coquette has chosen to lead him in her string for a year or so? Yes, Herr von Trantow, a heartless coquette, who never was worth the regards of an honest man and now--no, she is hardly worth our compassion. I can tell you, I have learned that truth to my cost."

"So have I," said Hans.

"I know it."

Hans shook his head as if to say, that is not what I mean. I knew of old how to translate his gestures.

"Have you seen her since?" I asked.

He nodded.

"Where and when?"

"Eight or nine years ago, in--what do they call the hole?--Naples."

"That was the time that you disappeared from here, and no one knew what had become of you."

"Yes," said Hans.

"In Naples?"

"Yes."

It quite taxed the imagination to fancy Hans von Trantow in Naples, the northern bear among the southern jackals, and a most urgent impulse must it have been which drove him for the first and only time in his life from the Penates of his ruined home, and his native heaths and moors, out into the wide world.

It was in December nine years before--I had then been a month in detention under examination--that Hans had received a letter which caused him to lay game-bag and gun aside--he was just going out shooting--harness up his sledge and drive off to Fährdorf, where he crossed the ice to Uselin, and from Uselin travelled day and night, until after many hinderances--he at first thought he must look for Naples in Turkey, and only found the right direction after extreme difficulties and some lost time--at the end of about a month he happily reached the city he was in search of. Here, after some trouble--for the good Hans spoke and understood no language but his own honest German--he discovered the hotel mentioned in the letter, and found her whom he was looking for. But not as he expected to find her; not as the letter had represented her. She had spoken of herself as "betrayed," "forsaken," one who looked to him as her only refuge, her preserver from the direst misery and a certain death. Hans had naturally taken all this literally, and was somewhat astounded to find her in one of the grandest hotels on the Toledo, in luxuriously furnished apartments, and splendidly dressed, looking more lovely than ever, though not a little confused--indeed, even turning pale--at sight of him. She had probably not supposed that her appeal would receive so instantaneous a response, and that she would have no notice beforehand, and in consequence she was taken unprepared. So it had to be that a German princess, who was really in Naples at the time, had interested herself in her, and insisted that the daughter of so ancient and distinguished a family should accept her assistance. But the favor of the great is inconstant, and often clogged with conditions hard to be complied with by a proud spirit. The princess had demanded, as the price of her favor, that Constance should marry off-hand a certain young Baron, who, it was said, had stood a little too high in the exalted favor of the princess herself; and she, Constance, was one of those who may err, and err grievously, but will never act against the voice of their heart.

This story the fair Circe had told the true-hearted Hans, with many tears and sighs, and blushes and smiles, and convulsive sobbings, and he, who did not possess the sceptical spirit of the much-enduring man, believed every word, and had returned to his modest lodgings, pondering and racking his brain to find out what he could do to help her.

To marry her was out of the question. A Trantow could take no woman to wife who was not as chaste as he himself was brave; not though she were a hundred times fairer and he had loved her a hundred times more dearly. But to share with her what he had, to protect her and care for her and do for her what in a similar case a brother might do for an unfortunate but dearly loved sister--this Hans could do and would do; and the next morning he went to lay his plans before her. But in the night Circe had taken other counsel, and left her palace under the protection of the aforesaid young Baron, who in reality stood in no connection whatever with the high lady she had referred to, but in a very intimate one with young Prince Prora, and since the young prince had left Naples a month before, by his father's orders, in quite an intimate relation to Constance herself, who had been transferred to him as an equivalent for a considerable sum of money which the prince had lost to him at play. So at least Hans was told--and much beside which he neither asked nor wanted to know--by a German waiter at the hotel, who seemed to have taken a very active, if not very creditable part in the whole affair. As Hans had not come to Naples to lounge along the Toledo, or visit Capri, or climb Vesuvius, he shook the dust from his feet and set out on his homeward journey. But the good faithful fellow did not get far. The unusual exertion and excitement of so long a journey made in such furious haste, the change of climate and mode of living, the fiery Italian wine, which from old habits he had drunk in great quantity, and more than all else the deep grief at this second atrocious treachery, which was far worse than the first, were too much for even his strong constitution, and one day a compassionate _vetturino_ brought to the gate of a monastery near Rome a traveller who had fallen sick by the way, and who really seemed to have reached the end of all his journeys.

But it was not fated that the good Hans should exhale his free brave soul in the narrow cell of a Roman monastery; despite the extremely irrational treatment of Fra Antonio, the celebrated physician to the convent, he recovered, and in six weeks could walk about the garden. The garden was a very fine one, with a magnificent view of the Eternal City, and the monks, if not particularly clean, were very kind and hospitable, and very urgently pressed the worthy Hans to consider whether it would not be for the welfare of his soul to return no more to his barbarian home, but come rather to the bosom of the true Church, to die perhaps, if it were heaven's will, some day in that very monastery in the odor of sanctity. A singular proposal to the good Hans, who in his life had never given a moment's thought to the present or future welfare of his soul; but it was quite clear to him that however salutary it might be for his immortal part, to follow the counsel of the good fathers, he would have in doing so to renounce all the comfort of his life. The convent wine was right good of its kind, but it had a peculiar flavor to which he could never get accustomed, any more than he could to seeing the trees in blossom at the end of February, as if at this time there were no keen gusty north-east wind in the world, and no pine-woods whose boughs bent with their weight of pendent icicles; and when one night a comforting dream had conveyed him to Trantowitz, and by the feeble light of the northern stars and of the snow had let him shoot six hares in his cabbages out of his bedroom window, there was no holding him any longer after he awoke; he shook the brown dirty hands of his friendly hosts, one after the other, received the Prior's benediction upon his heretical head, and returned to his old home.

All this Hans told me in his monotonous way, while we sat on the edge of the trench. And the long-legged beetles shot back and forth in the brown water, and the birds twittered in the branches, and the call of the cuckoo came from the far-off woods.

I felt very sad. I believe I should have been less affected if Hans had exhibited the least emotion in the recital of the most eventful and certainly most painful passage of his life; but of this there was not the slightest trace. He felt no hatred towards Constance, no grudge against the young prince, who was now living at Rossow in the immediate neighborhood: in all that he said there lay a perfect resignation, an utter hopelessness; and this it was that made me so sad.

There was a rustling in the coppice behind us, and an old pointer trotting up greeted first Hans and then me with a melancholy wag of his tail.

"God bless me! that is not Caro, is it?" I asked.

"Yes it is," said Hans. "I believe he knows you."

"Poor old fellow!" I said, patting the dog; "and does he still do his duty?"

"So, so," said Hans. "He has been of no use with pheasants for a long time; and with ducks, that used to be his great point, he will not go into the water any more, so that I usually have to get them myself. But that is only natural: we are neither of us so young as we once were."

Caro had seated himself on the edge of the trench, staring with pricked-up ears at the beetles in the water, and evidently thinking of nothing at all; Hans sat with his left elbow propped on his knee, blowing thick clouds from his cigar, also staring into the trench, and apparently thinking of nothing also. I felt sadder and sadder. The contrast between the active life I had just been picturing to myself, and the melancholy of this stagnant, purposeless existence, was too great.

"Suppose we go," I said, suddenly rising.

"Very well," said Hans, slowly following my example.

Not much was said between us as we crossed the heath, until we reached the point where the path to Zehrendorf branched off near Trantowitz whose buildings looked forlorner and more dilapidated than ever.

"So you are going to live here always," said Hans, as we were about to separate.

"Always?" I said. "How came you to think that?"

"I?" he said, in evident surprise that I should suspect him of originating any idea--"I did not think it: Fräulein Duff told me so."

"And did she tell you why I was to stay here always?"

"Of course; and I wish you joy with all my heart."

"Wish me joy of what?" I asked, taking with some hesitation his offered hand.

Hans blushed and stammered, "Excuse me: I had no intention of being indiscreet; but I thought it was no secret, or at least none between us."

"In the name of heaven, what _are_ you talking about?" I asked, and I think I turned even redder than Hans, if that were possible.

"Why, are you not betrothed to Fräulein Hermine or about to be?" he stammered out.

I laughed loud; louder than any one who laughs honestly, and Hans, who took this for an indirect confession, again seized my hand and said:

"I wish you joy with all my heart: I do not know any one in the whole world whom I would so gladly see win her as yourself. And the people here need a good master."

He pressed my hand again, and then went on, Caro trotting after him with drooping head. I looked after them. "Indeed," I said to myself, "it would be a better lot than has fallen to your share, you good faithful fellow."

I turned. There lay before me the new mansion and grounds of Zehrendorf, and lower down, nearer to me, there crouched close to the earth the same little dilapidated, dirty cottages that I remembered of old; and in the fields, splendid in their vernal beauty, I saw working the same care-worn, poverty-stricken men, and I thought of all I had seen and heard this morning, and said to myself, "Yes, indeed, you need a good master!"

Then I walked slowly, almost hesitatingly, along the footpaths through the green corn-fields to Zehrendorf.