“Their garments are your own shaping!” exclaimed the aunt, now in an accent of real, not conventional respect.
“Spinning and weaving, shaping and sewing,” said Friedel, coming near to let the housewife examine the texture.
“Close woven, even threaded, smooth tinted! Ah, Stina, thou didst learn something! Thou wert not quite spoilt by the housefather’s books and carvings.”
“I cannot tell whose teachings have served me best, or been the most precious to me,” said Christina, with clasped hands, looking from one to another with earnest love.
“Thou art a good child. Ah! little one, forgive me; you look so like our child that I cannot bear in mind that you are the Frau Freiherrinn.”
“Nay, I should deem myself in disgrace with you, did you keep me at a distance, and not thou me, as your little Stina,” she fondly answered, half regretting her fond eager movement, as Ebbo seemed to shrink together with a gesture perceived by her uncle.
“It is my young lord there who would not forgive the freedom,” he said, good-humouredly, though gravely.
“Not so,” Ebbo forced himself to say; “not so, if it makes my mother happy.”
He held up his head rather as if he thought it a fool’s paradise, but Master Gottfried answered: “The noble Freiherr is, from all I have heard, too good a son to grudge his mother’s duteous love even to burgher kindred.”
There was something in the old man’s frank, dignified tone of grave reproof that at once impressed Ebbo with a sense of the true superiority of that wise and venerable old age to his own petulant baronial self-assertion. He had both head and heart to feel the burgher’s victory, and with a deep blush, though not without dignity, he answered, “Truly, sir, my mother has ever taught us to look up to you as her kindest and best—”