smiled condescendingly upon me, "he would naturally be so."

In truth, Karl was Karl. "Time had not thinned his flowing locks;" he
was as handsome, as impulsive, and as true as ever; had added two babies
to his responsibilities, who, with his beloved Frau Gemahlin, had
likewise been bidden to this festivity, but had declined to quit the
stove and private Christmas-tree of home life. He wore no more short
jackets now; his sister Gretchen was engaged to a young doctor, and
Karl's head was growing higher--as it deserved--for it had no mean or
shady deeds to bow it.

The company then consisted _in toto_ of Graf and Graefin von Rothenfels,
who, I must record it, both looked full ten years younger and better
since their prodigal was returned to them, of Stella Wedderburn, Frau
von Francius, Karl Linders, and Friedhelm Helfen. May, as I said, looked
lovelier than ever. It was easy to see that she was the darling of the
elder brother and his wife. She was a radiant, bright creature, yet her
deepest affections were given to sad people--to her husband, to her
sister Adelaide, to Countess Hildegarde.

She and Eugen are well mated. It is true he is not a very cheerful
man--his face is melancholy. In his eyes is a shadow which never
wholly disappears--lines upon his broad and tranquil brow which are
indelible. He has honor and titles, and a name clean and high before
men, but it was not always so. That terrible bringing to reason--that
six years' grinding lesson of suffering, self-suppression--ay,
self-effacement--have left their marks, a "shadow plain to see," and
will never leave him. He is a different man from the outcast who stepped
forth into the night with a weird upon him, nor ever looked back till it
was dreed out in darkness to its utmost term.

He has tasted of the sorrows--the self-brought sorrows which make merry
men into sober ones, the sorrows which test a man and prove his
character to be of gold or of dross, and therefore he is grave. Grave
too is the son who is more worshiped by both him and his wife than any
of their other children. Sigmund von Rothenfels is what outsiders call
"a strange, incomprehensible child;" seldom smiles, and has no child
friends. His friends are his father and "Mother May"--Muetterchen he
calls her; and it is quaint sometimes to see how on an equality the
three meet and associate. His notions of what is fit for a man to be and
do he takes from his father; his ideal woman--I am sure he h