ss!"

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

Three or four hour's ride by rail from the scene of these incidents is
situated the little Thuringian city where Edwin had become a teacher of
mathematics and Franzelius had founded his printing office. The house
for whose purchase Papa Feyertag had advanced his son-in-law a
considerable sum, stood on the principal street, and the unpretending
old front bore a striking resemblance to a proof sheet stained with
printer's ink and scrawled over with various marks and dashes. Only the
sign over the door, was new, and bore in white letters on a black
ground the inscription: "Printing done by Reinhold Franzelius." It was
an old one story frame buildings with, a tile roof blackened by age and
as high as the house itself, and it contained, besides the work shop, a
number of chambers for the journeymen, and store rooms for paper and
other articles. On entering the house, the door to the left bore the
sign "office," and to the right was the entrance to the composing room,
from which a narrow passage led into the back building, where the
presses were.

In the upper story, in a plainly furnished but spacious sitting room,
sat two women, in whom we recognize the fair-haired Reginchen from
Dorotheenstrasse, now Frau Franzelius, and the zaunkoenig's daughter,
now Frau Doctor Edwin. The years that have elapsed have not passed over
the heads of either without leaving their traces, but the changes show
to the advantage of both. When we last saw Leah, she was lying on the
green sofa in the family sitting room at the 'Venetian palace,' with
haggard cheeks paled by hopeless passion, and we were only permitted to
see how the expiring spark of her young existence was rekindled by the
touch of love. Since that time her life has expanded into a quiet,
soul-full beauty, which is not striking at the first glance, but soon
shows the more thoughtful observer that there must be something unusual
about the young wife. She still wears her hair as she did in the days
other girlhood, wound in heavy braids about her head, and fastened
behind with two silver pins, almost in the style of the peasant girls
of Rome or Albano. The delicate, softly rounded oval face has grown
fuller, and no longer wears a sickly pallor, but the complexion is
still of alabaster whiteness, so that the eyes, which are her most
beautiful feature, glow with a still darker