pend the whole summer with them. Jansen
seconded this invitation in a very kind postscript; and the money
enclosed for the traveling expenses was reckoned for three persons.

It is needless to describe the feelings of this good soul as she read
this letter, and saw the prospect opened to her of seeing again with
her own eyes, and clasping again in her arms, all that she loved and
admired. With beating heart and glowing cheeks she sat for a good hour
motionless before her easel, and had never in all her life felt so
happily unhappy or so torn by conflicting wishes. When at last she had
clearly made up her mind to decline the proffered happiness, she
appeared, in her own eyes, such a subject for commiseration,
notwithstanding all her consciousness of heroic virtue, that she began
to weep bitterly, and did not heed how her tears fell upon a wreath of
flowers in water color that she had just painted, moistening them with
an all too natural dew.

CHAPTER III.

In order to explain this, we must disclose a secret that our artist had
heretofore guarded carefully from every one--even from herself, as far
as such a thing was possible.

The fate of the one man with whom this peaceable soul always stood on a
war-footing, and who, as it seemed, possessed none of all the qualities
by which one could generally win her love and admiration, had become of
such importance to her in the course of time, that her own weal and
woe, and even such a happiness as had just been offered her, became but
a secondary matter when compared with it.

That violent hate can turn into burning love is a fact that is no
longer considered strange. But the transformation of a thoroughly
honest and obvious contempt into the exact opposite, without the object
of these conflicting feelings having changed especially himself, must
ever remain a difficult riddle to solve. This was especially the case
because this contempt for her neighbor was not directed against his
character as an artist and a man, of whose good qualities she might in
time have become more clearly convinced, but rested solely on the
contradiction in their characters, which appeared to her to have been
completely reversed in their cases from what Nature had intended.

Little of the Amazon as there was about her, she nevertheless felt
herself, as compared with Rosenbusch, the stronger, more resolute and
more manly of the two; and, since devotion to somethi