l retain all your life the same activity that you showed five years
ago when we came here and when you carried my brother's books up-stairs
one by one, to enable you to run up and down more frequently. Now
jumping, you see, is not exactly my forte. But there is one peculiarity
about the pleasures a man enjoys: if he can't pursue them himself, they
are kind enough to come to him, and the happy hours that I have passed
up here during the last five years cannot be counted."

"Because, as mother always says, you are so moderate in your wants, and
so contented with everything."

"Oh! not at all, Reginchen. Your kind mother has a false opinion of me.
On the contrary, I am very much spoiled, I am by no means contented
with everything, and that is the very reason that I have no desire to
go out among the crowd of rude, coarse people, who are nothing to me,
to witness their self-torment in their endeavor to kill time, and to
lose the consciousness of their miserable, paltry, joyless lives; how
by means of bustle and fine dressing they try to appear to be something
which they are not, and standing on a huge pile of thalers which they
have scraped together Heaven knows how, attempt to pass themselves off
as great men. And now compare my life with all that, Reginchen:
constantly in the society of such a brother, possessing a few good
friends, just enough not to forget that even the best of men are not
Edwins, so well taken care of in such a pretty, comfortable house, with
no anxieties, and--besides--"

He hesitated and his color heightened. "Will you pass me the plate of
greens, Reginchen?" he asked, to conceal his embarrassment.

She did not seem to notice it.

"That is all very well," she said. "But, Herr Walter, are you not
always sick, and do you not have to bear a great deal of pain? And
health, it is said, is the greatest blessing."

He pushed back his plate and looked at her with such a light in his
blue eyes, that she grew a little embarrassed in her turn, and secretly
wondered whether she had said anything stupid or childish. To-day, for
the first time, she felt ill at ease in this gentle, cheerful presence,
confessing to herself, however, at the same time, that he was really
very handsome, as her mother had always said, and as, before, she would
never admit, since all sickness and repose was distasteful to her
bright, active temperament.

"Dear Reginchen," he said, "you are eighteen years old to-day, and it
is all