as far away as
possible.'

"I sprang up, and threw my arms around her. 'My poor, dear child,' I
begged, weeping, 'forgive me!'

"And she went, she really went away! On one of the first days of April,
early in the day, the carriage which was to take her away stopped before
the front steps.

"Anna Maria went down the steps with me, followed by Brockelmann. She
quickly got in, and drew her dark gauze veil over her face. 'Greet Klaus
heartily for me,' she whispered to me again; 'all the happiness in the
world to him and his wife!'

"Then she was gone, and I went quietly up the steps. It seemed
unspeakably strange and lonely here to me all at once. I wandered
through the newly furnished rooms; they had all been heated and the
windows opened. Comfortable, elegant, very pleasant it looked all about
here, as if made expressly for Susanna's beauty; but they were no longer
the old Buetze rooms, with their ancestral comfort, their dear
associations. I stood now in Susanna's little boudoir; I noticed a fold
of the pale blue portiere yonder hanging, out of order, over an
indistinguishable object--the upholsterer surely had not intended it so.
I went over and lifted up the heavy silk to lay it again in regular
folds on the carpet, when my eye fell upon a little old wooden cradle,
painted with a crest, and oddly curved, strangely contrasting, in its
rude form, with the elegant appointments of the room; and gently rocking
in it were shining white, fine, lace-trimmed pillows, daintily tied
with little blue bows; a basket pushed half under the couch of the young
wife concealed little clothes of the finest linen, most beautifully
sewed, hem-stitched, and trimmed with lace, made as only a skilled hand
knows how.

"'Anna Maria,' I said, softly, looking with moist eyes upon the old
cradle in which she, in which Klaus had once lain, and which now stood
here, a greeting of reconciliation to the heart of the young wife who
had robbed her of her peace and happiness.

"Two days later there was a lively stir at Buetze. Unfortunately, a bad
headache banished me to a sofa in my dark room, so that I could not
welcome the young couple on the threshold of their home. But I heard up
here the unusual moving about; the bell in the servants' room, which had
been formerly so seldom used, rang a regular alarm, and there was such a
slamming of doors and rushing and running about for the first few hours
that I had to draw the thickest pillow over my ac