m,
naturally arrested attention. Sometimes he would stand for an instant
beside the chess-table, or look over the shoulder of the painter, or
gently wave his hand in passing over the little brow of the sleeping
child, but all this he seemed to do unconsciously, as if absorbed in
some train of thought quite unconnected with the rainy Present, and
fixed either on a sunny Past, or sunny Future.

"What can you be about, dear Erminus?" enquired Frau Eugenie, who had
just returned from a housewifely excursion into the kitchen and
store-closet. "Here we all are pulling faces in keeping with this
horrible wet, and on yours there is actual fine weather, nay even a
kind of sunshine, as though you had secretly got betrothed, or had
written the last page of a book, or felt a toothache of four-and-twenty
hours subsiding. Come now, confess at once what this means, or we shall
suspect that it is nothing but most unholy exultation over us who do
not--like you--come to the country for the exact purpose of shutting
ourselves up in a room with books."

"I can satisfy you on that point, my good friend," answered, with a
laugh, the one thus addressed. "This time there is no malice in the
case, although I am enjoying myself; and your other hypotheses are,
thank God, equally groundless, nay, one of them actually impossible;
since I could hardly show a cheerful face if, after so long a freedom,
I had pledged myself to submit once more to petticoat government. No,
that which keeps up my equanimity, spite of our condition, is neither
more nor less than a pretty story on which I accidentally lighted
yesterday as I was looking over my old papers, and which now haunts me
in the same way a favourite melody will sometimes dwell upon the ear,
and constantly repeat itself."

"A story and a pretty one too!" said the artist. "Then you must
instantly let us have it as a matter of course. Have we not agreed to a
community of goods of all kinds so long as the rain lasts, and would
you keep a pretty story all to yourself? That would be a pretty story
indeed!"

"Perhaps, however, it might not please you," replied Erminus, standing
still beside her and twisting the long stalk of a water-lily into a
loop. "I at least care so little for many stories that have a great run
now-a-days, that I came long ago to the conclusion that mine was an
old-fashioned taste, and that I did not advance with the age. But in my
character of historian, I can console myself for