me to return and seek repose.

Irma would often say that she intended to spend much of her time with
the Gunthers, during the winter. The young widow and her child had now
come home to live with the father.

Irma would rarely retire for the night, without first visiting
Walpurga, who would generally lie awake and wait for her, and who, if
she had fallen asleep, would, as if conscious of her presence, awaken
as soon as Irma drew near. They would sit talking to each other for
some time. Walpurga had always much to relate about her clever prince,
and still more about the good queen.

The days grew shorter, the evenings longer. The gardeners were kept
busy, clearing the fallen leaves from the paths, before the court
awoke. It was said they would soon leave the summer palace and return
to the capital. The king had preceded them thither. Surrounded by a new
ministry, of which Schnabelsdorf was president, he opened the
parliament in person.

Gunther felt sorry, and expressed his regrets to Irma, that the king,
in appointing a reactionary and ultramonnate ministry, had taken a step
fraught with serious consequences. In firm and measured language, he
inveighed against all the romance of the convent. Irma had not enough
courage to confess how much she was to blame in all this, and consoled
herself with the thought that the king had, in the queen's presence,
rejected all outside influence. For the first time, she became
conscious of a feeling of antagonism to the doctor, who, in her eyes,
now seemed illiberal and filled with the fanaticism of unbelief. He was
a stranger to the greatest glory in life, the flights of a soaring
soul, and anathematized them by the words "romance" and
"sentimentalism." The king, solitary and alone while breasting the
torrent of public opinion, seemed to her greater than ever before. The
idea that she had once expressed in a letter to Emma, gradually became
clearer to her. No one but a king, and such a one as he, has the large
and comprehensive mind that will not suffer itself to be cramped by the
systems of the schools. Logic is only part of the human mind. The
complete man alone possesses a complete mind.

Even such a mind and such a man as the doctor, seemed to her to suffer
by comparison with the only one.

Walpurga was quite uneasy on account of the second change of residence,
and complained to Irma that it was a fearful life. "Why, it's nothing
but living in carriages. You never get a chanc