o promise of treading in his father's footsteps, and
when I thought of this, and of the lesson I had yestereve received, my
cheeks grew redder than they had already turned in the sharp December
air, or under the gaze of my new lover.

Howbeit I had no time for much thought; the sleigh was already at the
door, and or ever I was aware the old man had me in his arms and kissed
my lips and brow, and called me his dear and well-beloved daughter. Then
the younger man pressed forward to assert his claims, and when he bent
over me I threw my arms round his neck, and he lifted me up, for all that
I was none of the lightest in my winter furs and thick raiment, out of
the sleigh like a child, and again his lips were on mine. But we might
not suffer them to meet for more than a brief kiss. Uncle Conrad had
discovered my aunt's face among all her wrappings, and gave loud
utterance to his well-founded horror, while my aunt cried out to her
long-lost son by name again and again, with all the love of a longing and
long-robbed mother's heart.

I gladly set my lover free, and at the next minute he was on his knees in
the snow and his trembling hands removed wrap after wrap from the beloved
head, Kubbeling helping him from the driving-seat with his great hands,
purpled by the cold.

And again in a few minutes the mother was covering her only son's head
with tender kisses, so violently and so long that her strength failed her
and she fell back on the pillows, overdone.

Hereupon Gotz bowed over her, and as he had erewhile lifted his
sweetheart out of the sleigh, so now he lifted his mother; and while he
held her thus in his arms and bore her into the house, not heeding the
kerchiefs which dropped off by degrees and lay in a long line covering
the ground behind her, as coals do which are carried in a broken scuttle,
she cried in a trembling voice: "Oh you bad, only boy, you my darling and
heart-breaker, you noble, wicked, perverse fellow! Gotz my son, my own
and my All!"

And when she had found a place in the warm room, in the head forester's
wife's arm-chair by the fire, I removed her needless raiment and Gotz
sank down at her feet, and she took his head in her hands, and cried:

"I did not wait for you to come, but flew to meet you, my lad, by reason
that, as you know--I took a sinful oath never to bid you to come home.
But oath and vow are nought; they are null and void! I have learned from
the depths of my heart that Heaven had no