ible to others,
moreover the black clothes of his profession sat as well upon him as did
his wife's white dresses and kerchiefs of costly stuffs upon her. These
she was fond of relieving by a bit of light blue, her favourite colour.
The slim young Italian, with her bowed head and beautiful pale face
framed in its black hair, seemed like an elf who had gone out in her
light dress to dance the May dance in the moonlight and had decked
herself with forget-me-not and gentian.

Whoever saw her felt glad, for it seemed to him as if he had met with
a piece of good fortune, but no one sought to make her acquaintance,
although the doctor had not omitted to take her, soon after their
arrival, to call upon his relatives and the dignitaries of the city.
People had asked them at first to dine, but as Melchior always refused
because of his wife's delicate health, they did not press the matter;
for no one could talk with her as she understood no German, while all
who heard her light cough felt that the doctor was right to guard his
fragile treasure so carefully.

When the few matrons who visited her called upon her, instead of finding
her in the kitchen or the cellar, they found her lying upon the sofa
with a book or her guitar in her hands, or perhaps playing with her
little boy, and the amiable ones among them explained it by her pale
face and delicate air, but the severer ones said that such idleness was
the Italian custom and they pitied the doctor.

What the feminine relatives of the doctor chiefly resented was the fact
that the young couple seemed to get on so perfectly well without them.
Happiness indeed shone in their eyes, and the silent doctor seemed to
find his tongue when he walked in the woods and fields with his beloved
wife. The notary Anselmus Winckler was also loud in his praises of both
of them. He was the only person who ever joined them in their walks
through the woods, and as he had been for several years Melchior's
companion at school in Bologna, and had there learned to speak the
sweet Italian tongue, he could talk with Frau Blanca like one of her own
countrymen. He was a convivial person, and when he was in the tavern, or
dining with a friend, he would expatiate on how learned the doctor was
in all the secrets of nature and how well Dr. Vitali, Frau Bianca's
father, had known how to cultivate her appreciation of the good and
the beautiful. To hear her questions and her husband's tender and wise
replies was a