respectful towards the daughter of the house.

When he rode up to the villa, the carriages had already arrived, and
Eric received from Herr Sonnenkamp a reproof for his want of
friendliness in not remaining at home, or taking note of the hour of
their arrival.

After the conversation that he had had with Knopf, the feeling of being
in service seemed to him now very strange; or was this reception
intended to give him a hint of how he was to conduct himself towards
Manna?

Eric made no reply to the reprimand, for such it was. He came to
Roland, who warmly embraced him and cried,--

"Ah! with you only is it well, all the rest are--"

"Say nothing about the rest," interrupted Eric.

But he could not restrain Roland from relating the disappointment of
all, that Manna did not return with them.

Eric breathed more freely.

Roland mixed up in his relation an account of Bella's getting out at
the water-cure establishment on their return, because a message from
Count Clodwig had informed her that he would meet her there. Finally he
said,--

"What does all the rest amount to? You are there in the convent, and I
have told Manna that you look just like the Saint Anthony in the church
of the convent. Yes, laugh, if you please! If he should laugh, he would
laugh just like you; he looked just as you look now. Manna told me the
story. The saint has been praying to heaven, and the Christ-child has
laid himself there in his arms, when he was all alone, and he looks at
him so lovingly, so devoutly."

Eric was thrilled; a pure living being has also been given into his
hands. Is he worthy to receive it, and can his look rest purely upon
it?

They sat together without speaking, and Roland, at last, cried,--

"We will not leave each other again, ever. To-day when I sat there upon
the deck, all alone, it seemed to me--I was not asleep, I was wide
awake--it seemed that you came, and took me in your arms and held me."

Roland's face glowed; he was feverishly excited, and Eric had great
difficulty in calming him down. But what he could not easily do was
easy for the dogs; Roland became the self-forgetting child again, when
he was with the dogs, who had grown so astonishingly in a few days.

Pranken also came in a very friendly way to Eric, and said that he
admired his stimulating power, for Roland had exhibited during their
absence a susceptibility of mind and a sensitiveness of feeling, which
no one would have supposed him capa