CHAPTER LX.
"She is right, perhaps," Willibald said, half aloud, as his mother vanished; "but she will be unhappy alone, and without the long-accustomed activity. I know that she will not be able to bear the enforced rest. You ought to have begged her to remain, too, Marietta."
The young wife laid her curly head upon her husband's shoulder and looked at him roguishly.
"Oh, no; I shall do something better. I shall see to it that mamma does not get unhappy when she leaves us."
"You? How will you do that?"
"Quite easily. I shall marry mamma off."
"But, Marietta, what are you thinking of?"
"Oh, you wise Willy; have you really not noticed anything?" laughed Marietta, and it was the old, silvery laugh with which she had bewitched him at Waldhofen. "And you do not know why Uncle Schonan was in such a grim temper when we saw him in Berlin three days ago? And why he did not want to come to Burgsdorf at all, although we begged him so much? Mamma did not ask him, because she feared a renewed proposal. He understood it, and consequently he was so angry. I have known all about it ever so long; even at the time when mamma came to us at Waldhofen, and he told her so fiercely that she would only use him as a secondary person at a wedding. I saw then that he would like to be one of the principals. Willy, you are making a superb face now! You look exactly as you did at the beginning of our acquaintance."
The young lord did not, indeed, look very intellectual in his boundless surprise. He had never considered the possibility of his mother marrying again, and to her brother-in-law, besides! But it broke upon him that this was an excellent solution of the difficulty.
"Marietta, you are surpassingly clever!" he cried, looking with the greatest admiration at his wife, who accepted the homage with much satisfaction.