song, which you once wrote out for me, say:

"No matter what tempests may burst overhead,
We'll cling to each other our pathway to tread--?"

"My darling," He exclaimed, fairly beside himself with delight, while a
ray of surprise and joy flashed over his gloomy face, "is this true?
You have--you have remembered this--applied it to me, to us both? Oh! I
never ventured to hope for so much. My precious Reginchen! And now--how
happy I should be--if I only dared. Tell me once more, dear precious
child, is it true? You would have gone with me, if I had proposed
it--and your parents--But no, tell me nothing! It can do no good, and
will only make my hard task still harder." He sank down on a stool by
the table, and buried his face in his broad hands. Reginchen watched
him in silence. She could not understand his behavior. What was it that
stood in the way? Why could it "do no good," this acknowledgement of
her love, and her willing offer to go out into the wide world with him?

Suddenly he started up and approaching her said: "Promise me, dear
Reginchen, that you'll try to forget what I have said. I ought to have
kept silence; but my feelings overpowered me. And now farewell and make
_him_ happy. He deserves it more than I, he also loves you truly and
fondly--though certainly no one in the whole world can hold you dearer
than I."

He pressed his lips to her hands, then strove to release them and rush
out of the workshop. But Reginchen stopped him. "Dear Herr Franzelius,"
she said, "if you're in earnest and really love me, why do you grieve
me so, by telling me things I don't understand, and asking me to make
somebody else happy when I do not even know of whom you're speaking? I
love you too, and if it were only my parents--but speak; I don't
understand a single word of all you have said."

He paused at the door and looked at her in astonishment. "Is it
possible?" said he. "That you have no idea of whom I mean? That you see
him daily, and yet have never perceived what an impression you have
made on his heart? I noticed it long ago, and suffered deeply in
consequence. Oh! Reginchen, you don't know what it is to grudge such a
friend the love of such a girl, because one loves her himself! And yet
I know what I owe him, how deeply, perhaps fatally, it would wound him,
if you and I--"

"Merciful Heaven!" she suddenly exclaimed, "no, no, it's
impossible--you can't mean Herr Walter!"

"And why not?"