"And how blest we are once more,--each living in the other's heart!"
"Oh, why is our child not with us?" Thea cried.
He kissed the tears from her eyes. "He has been our guardian angel, my darling," he said. "He has reunited us; for who can say how long we should have been estranged from each other without this sorrow?"
Late in the afternoon of this day Thea carried a bunch of white roses to the little chapel; Bernhard was with her, and as they entered he took one of the fragrant rosebuds from her hand and laid it on Lothar's coffin.
"Requiescat in pace," he whispered softly.
Hand in hand they stood before their child's coffin, one in their sorrow, one in their love. The last rays of the setting sun streamed through the stained glass of the window and played upon the wreaths and palm branches, and when Bernhard and Thea left the chapel, forest and field lay before them bathed in the red gold of sunset, and they walked hand in hand through the nodding grasses and bright flowers of the little grave-yard towards a new life in the old home.
[CONCLUSION.]
Years have flown by. A stock company has taken in hand the railway in which Bernhard was so much interested, and there is a station at R----, where the express-train from Warschau is just arriving.
A man with a dark sunburned face is leaning out of a coupé window, looking eagerly across the platform towards the town and the poplar avenue leading to Eichhof. Then he scans those who are leaving and those who are entering the train, and a shadow of melancholy clouds his brow.
"Strangers, all strangers!" he murmurs. "How changed it is! The same place, and yet so different; and no one here to recognize me."