hotel-keeper in a respectable position; I am to be a librarian, and if my salary is not sufficient, I shall marry a wife with some money. Fate has provided for us in order to help us to this judicious termination!'

6

The rain was now less violent. He could go; and until the post-diligence started, he could look about the town. His watch seldom went accurately, he had too often forgotten to wind it up; thus he arrived on this day, also, too soon for the post. The coach was just being laden with the luggage of the travellers. Inspecting his own box, which was still in the doorway, stood the man whom he had seen with the pale woman. He accosted him as Herr Doctor.' Here on the box he had read the name of the honoured customer who had unfortunately at so early an hour in the morning found everything in disorder. An officer's corps had supped with him, he said, and the house had been late in consequence. It was a bad journey, he remarked, to Anrich in such weather, and the road would be very bad also to the estate of the Count. He should like to be recommended to the favour of the Count; the Count would scarcely remember him. And the host held out to Johannes the card which was

intended to bring the new possessor of an old establishment to the remembrance of the fashionable world. Johannes looked at the man who had investigated his movements. He had seen him somewhere before. His appearance was repulsive; he had the false-sounding manner of speaking, and the affected ease, with which common people think to imitate the elegant man of the world. He was rather a handsome man, tall and strong limbed, dressed in the last fashion, but fat and well fed as a capon ready to be killed. The man seemed to think a good deal of himself; he kept twisting his black moustache or playing with his thick gold watch-chain, or giving a glance of admiration at the large diamond in his ring. One glove he had drawn off, and he looked at the thick signet-ring with its engraved coat of arms which he wore on his thumb, like a chancellor. The Count von der Goerde will 6 perhaps remember me, I have seen better days and was born to other things; I beg you to give him my humble respects,' he said with a low. reverence as Johannes took his place in the postchaise.

What had the man really wanted? It looked almost as if he had wished to know where

Johannes was going. Was it possible that Maria . . how had she come into contact with that low infamous countenance?

Johannes felt, from the kind of pity with which she inspired him, how much he was, after all, inwardly changed.

CHAPTER IV.

THE COUNT'S STORY.

THE Count von der Goerde had gone through a severe attack of gout. Johannes was astonished at the change which had taken place in the castle and garden, but still more with that which marked the person of the proprietor. While the former had improved, and looked elegant and comfortable under the direction of the pleasant lady who bore the dignity of mistress of the house, a kind of decline, on the contrary, had come over the master. He had grown thin, and was visibly older. The arts of the toilette in the remedies of rejuvenescence contributed to give him almost the appearance of a whited sepulchre.

These few years have made you grow old, and have taken away with them all the freshness and bloom that nature gives us,' thought Johannes; and he took up a mirror and thought that it was probably the same with himself. Hitherto no one had told him that the wrinkles in his forehead had grown deeper, that his hair was

thinner, and that the scar on his forehead had be. come obliterated. He felt as he had always done; vigour and health were the heritage which his mother had left him a better one than that which Arthur's delicate mother had bestowed on her son. It occurred to Johannes that his father also had died of consumption.

'So even in this, then, we are linked by nature,' he said to himself; 'grown as it were out of the same soil. Both of us, Arthur and I, thrive and live. Maria, poor woman, whose beauty is fading and vanishing, where the sun seems to shine too hotly, as the hard life of the tender flower is shattered and withering. Gentleness, goodness, and reason establish themselves in our heart, but beauty is a power like poetry and art. We feel ourselves seized and carried away by its higher rhythm.'

The Count had declined in spirits and humour. He complained of the miserable years a man has to get through. It was well for Johannes, he said, that he had been away in the year 1848. He would not now, he hoped, be foolish enough to go to Holstein, as he could count on his fingers how soon there also order and quiet would be restored. The Count complained of