ain and will give you
sugar.' That's how she put the idea into my head. It's wonderful how
it sometimes seems as if an angel were speaking out of a child's
mouth. Your little Annie may have been an angel to us all."

Fritz Nettenmair laughed so boisterously at the child that Apollonius'
laughter caught fire again from his. But Fritz knew that it was a
devil that had spoken out of the child's mouth. Yet he laughed--so
hard that it did not strike Apollonius how forced and disconnected his
reply was. "Well then, tomorrow, as far as I'm concerned, or even this
afternoon; now I can't possibly spare the time. Now I'll go down with
you to St. George's. I have a necessary errand to do tomorrow! Oh, the
confounded child!"

Apollonius had no suspicion how seriously the laughing "confounded"
was meant. He said, still laughing at the child himself, "Good. We'll
ask tomorrow then. And then everything will be different. I am looking
forward to it as gladly as the child, and you are too, I know, Fritz.
We'll make it a very different life from what we have been leading."
Kindhearted Apollonius rejoiced so heartily at his brother's joy! He
continued to do so even after he was up again on his swinging seat,
flying round the church roof.

Just as restlessly hovered about his brother's fear the sinister
something that hung above him and threatened to engulf him; still more
industriously did his heart hammer away at the crumbling plans to
hinder the fall: but the ship of his thoughts did not hang between
heaven and earth, held by the light of heaven. It pitched deeper and
ever deeper between earth and hell, and hell branded him ever darker
with its fire.

Toward evening Christiane was suddenly aroused from her dreaming by
two men's voices. She was sitting in the grass not far from the closed
door of the shed. Fritz and his brother had just entered the shed from
the street at the back. She heard him teasing his brother about Anne
Wohlig. Anne was the best match in the whole town--and Apollonius was
a rascal who knew the world and the species that wore long hair and
aprons. Anne was already sewing away at her outfit, and her cousins
were carrying the news of her approaching marriage to Apollonius from
house to house. Christiane heard her husband ask when the wedding was
to be. She had been about to move away; now she forgot to go, she
forgot to breathe. And then she almost gave a jubilant shout:
Apollonius had said that he was not going