He remained, and helped them in the garden and among the flowers. He was given a little bedroom, with a blue wooden bedstead. From it, mornings, he could see the wet, yellow linden leaves slipping along the window-panes; and nights, the dark boughs rocking to and fro—with the stars playing hide-and-seek behind them. He gave names to the stars, and called the brightest Windekind.
He told his history to the flowers—almost all of which he had known at home; the big, serious asters, the gaudy zinias, and the white chrysanthemums which continued to bloom so late in the rude autumn. When all the other flowers were dead the chrysanthemums still stood—and even after the first snowfall, when Johannes came one morning early to look at them, they lifted their cheerful faces and said: "Yes, we are still here. You didn't think we would be, did you?" They were very brave, but two days later they were all dead.
But the palms and tree-ferns still flourished in the green-house, and the strange flower-clusters of the orchids hung in their humid, sultry air. Johannes gazed with wonder into the splendid cups, and thought of Windekind. On going out-of-doors, how cold and colorless everything looked—the black footsteps in the damp snow, and the rattling, dripping skeletons of trees!
Hour after hour, while the snowflakes were silently falling until the branches bowed beneath their weight of down, Johannes walked eagerly on in the violet dusk of the snow-shadowed woods. It was silence, but not death. And it was almost more beautiful than summer verdure; the interlocking of the pure white branches against the clear blue sky, or the descending clouds of glittering flakes when a heavily laden shrub let slide its snowy burden.
Once, on such a walk, when he had gone so far that nothing was to be seen save snow, and snow-covered branches—half white, half black—and all sound and life seemed smothered under its glistening covering, he thought he saw a tiny white animal run nimbly out in front of him. He followed it. It bore no likeness to any that he knew. Then he tried to grasp it, but it sped away and disappeared in a tree-trunk. Johannes peered into the round, black opening, and thought—"Could it be Wistik?"
He did not think much about him. It seemed mean to do so, and he did not wish to weaken in his doing of penance. And life with the two good people left him little to ask for. Evenings, he had to read aloud out of a thick book, in which much was said about God. But he knew that book, and read it absent-mindedly.
The night after his walk in the snow, however, he lay awake in bed, looking at the cold shining of the moonlight on the floor. Suddenly he saw two tiny hands close beside him—clinging fast to the bedside. Then the top of a little white fur cap appeared between the two hands, and at last he saw a pair of earnest eyes under high-lifted eyebrows.
"Good evening, Johannes," said Wistik. "I came to remind you of our agreement. You cannot have found the book yet, for the spring has not come. But are you keeping it in mind? What is the thick book I have seen you reading in? That cannot be the true book. Do not think that."
"I do not think so, Wistik," said Johannes. He turned over and tried to go to sleep again, but he could not get the little key out of his head.
And from this time on, as he read in the thick book, he kept thinking about it, and he saw clearly that it was not the true book.