, and made a beseeching sign for him to calm himself. In doing
this, she involuntarily moved a little nearer to him.

"For Heaven's sake!" she stammered, "what are you doing? Pray--pray
leave me. It can never, it must never be!--never, never! A secret, that
I dare not tell to any one, not even in the--"

"In the confessional," she was about to add. Suddenly she started back,
in alarm at what she had already said, and bowed her face down upon her
book again.

"This miserable, faint-hearted, wretched world of shopkeepers!" raved
Rosenbusch, on his stool over opposite. "Can there still be bold and
manly deeds? O Nanny! if it only were as it once was, I would come
spurring up to your father's castle some fine night on my gallant
charger. You would let down a rope-ladder from the donjon-window, and
would swing yourself up behind me on my horse--and away we would go
into the wide, wide world! But nowadays--"

"Hm! nowadays we have railroads," she murmured, slyly.

"Girl!" he cried, in a sepulchral voice, "are you really in earnest?
You would--you have the courage? O dearest Nanny of my heart! If I
should elope with you, you would love me so dearly that you would
follow me to the end of the world--"

She shook her head. There was a sound like a suppressed giggle.

"Nonsense!" she said, "we need only go as far as Pasing. Then papa will
steam by us; or we can do as another couple once did. They merely went
to the top of the church of St. Peter and sat concealed there with the
warden, and their people went searching about all over the country for
them, while they sat there and laughed at them all."

"Nanny, love, you really will--oh, what a heavenly idea! To-morrow--if
you are truly in earnest--to-morrow evening at this time--"

This time she actually laughed out loud, but she held her handkerchief
before her face.

"Oh, stop!" she said, "I was only joking! It is absurd to talk of such
a thing! Mother would worry herself to death, and besides--but we must
go; Fanny has risen already."

She put her book up near her face, so as to pray as quickly as
possible. But he, burning with his adventurous spirit, and encouraged
by the darkness of the place, quickly whispered to her:

"And you will send me away in this fashion? Not a single stolen--oh,
Nanny dear, you would be doing a good deed--a kiss, in all honor!"

She seemed to have suddenly become deaf, so motionless did she kneel
there, with her eyes tightly closed. At l