Then a smile lit her pretty face.
"Do you remember, Willy, how grandfather left word we would come back when Napoleon was conquered?"
"It is nine years," said Willy, "but you can come now, for Napoleon is conquered."
Bettina nodded, her face still wet with tears, while her mouth was smiling.
"They will all be glad to see you," continued Willy. "Mother and father, and the Schmelzes, and your grandfather Weyland. He is just the same, quite as if nothing had happened."
And so Bettina went back, and old Hans called her "Annchen," thinking her always his daughter, and when she married Willy and had children of her own, he used to sing for them the old song of Frederick Barbarossa, and tell them how he had seen the beautiful Princess Louisa come into Berlin in a gold coach to be married.
Marianne went back to the "Stork's Nest," and presently home came her brothers. Madame von Stork's face lost its troubled look, and only the memory of Wolfgang came to make their happy home troubled.
"Marianne is the best daughter a mother ever had," she often told her husband, "and I owe it to our good Queen, for books and Goethe nearly ruined her."
"Not Goethe," the professor always said, but his wife insisted.
Certainly a great honour was to come to Marianne.