"À propos, since you are shortly to pay my governor a visit, my dear Eichhof, why not take the ring with you?" said Hugo.
"Walter had already thought of doing so, but had not made up his mind how to propose it. He took the ring, and his heart beat fast. Fate willed that the ring he had cast away in anger should now be returned to him; he would accept the omen,--it was the talisman of his good fortune that he had thus regained. Therefore on the drive home to Schönthal he was in the gayest humour, while Herr von Rosen and Alma could not recover from the impression the visit had made upon them. They had had a fleeting glimpse of a modern fashionable marriage, and both were prompted to make a comparison which pained them.
"He is going to Egypt and she to France," Herr von Rosen thought, "and this they call not being 'bored.' And my daughter and my son-in-law, too, have put miles between them. Are they afraid of being 'bored'? Good heavens! have home-life and home-happiness lost all charm for the young people of the present day?"
Alma on her part thought of the cool courtesy with which Hugo Hohenstein and his wife treated each other, and then her thoughts travelled to Thea and Bernhard. Would they at some future day treat each other thus, or even more coldly and stiffly? She longed to see Thea again; now when her first sharp pang for Lothar's death was past, and when her mother was so nearly well, the secret in which she was a sharer weighed heavily upon her youthful soul. The world was so fair and sunny, and people were so kind, and Dr. Nordstedt--no, he had nothing to do with it; but she felt so calmly happy that her heart was full of gratitude to God for this lovely world. But then, when she remembered Thea and Lothar, she felt that she was wrong to be happy and to enjoy. Oh, there was so much sorrow in the world after all!
And to-day, after the visit to Rollin, she felt in a particularly melancholy mood. Rollin had impressed her as so sadly changed, she missed Adela everywhere; she thought of how changed too Eichhof would be when Thea finally returned thither, and she remembered that their guests were to leave Schönthal on the morrow.
Occupied with these thoughts, she went out alone in the evening into the park, while the rest were sitting on the veranda. Frau von Rosen soon reentered the house, and asked her husband to come with her, as she wished to speak with him. Nordstedt and Walter were left alone. Nordstedt drummed with his fingers upon the garden-table, near which he sat, in a nervous way quite unlike him. He arose once or twice, then seated himself and drummed again, saying, at last, "I will go find Fräulein Alma; the evening is damp, she may take cold."
"Well, then, come," said Walter, evidently regarding his companionship as indispensable.
Nordstedt stood one moment in silence, then put both hands upon his young friend's shoulders, and said, gently, "Let me go alone; I have something to say to Fräulein Alma."
"Nordstedt, is it possible?" Walter ejaculated, having already during his visit at Schönthal made up his mind that it was not Adela who had wrought the change in Nordstedt which had so surprised and annoyed him in Berlin.
Nordstedt looked abroad into the moonlight. "Much is possible, my dear fellow; nothing is certain!" he said. And without another word he descended the steps of the veranda and walked alone: the moonlit path towards the park.