"I believe you. At your age it would have been the realization of my most cherished hopes."
"Have you never travelled?"
"I spent a couple of years in Paris."
"Oh, yes, studying your profession; but you would have liked entire freedom, and to wander where the paths were not quite so well worn, if I am not mistaken in you."
The doctor laughed again. "He first bewails his own fate, and now is bewailing mine," he exclaimed. "My dear Eichhof, you are in a deucedly morbid, sentimental mood to-day, and farewells are scarcely propitious to the cure of such maladies. If you are really going away to-morrow, come and say good-by to my father and mother, and afterwards I will walk home with you."
They repaired to Herr Nordstedt's study in the main portion of the house.
"Ah, Herr von Eichhof," said the old man, as Walter entered. "Glad to see you once more before you go to the university. Well, what cheer? Is all right between you and your father? Has the Baron consented?"
His son in a few words made him acquainted with the state of the case.
"Well, well," said the father, running his fingers through his thick hair, only faintly streaked with gray, as was his wont when anything went "against the grain" with him, as he expressed it,--"well, well, it will all come right in the end, and you will reconcile yourself to the law, as I did to carpentering. You see, Herr von Eichhof, I believed I was more of an artist than an artisan, and I was wild to take up the brush instead of the chisel and plane. I longed to study, but that would have cost money. I turned to the plane instead, and, thank God, all came right in the end."
"And you never could have married me, Nikolas," said Frau Nordstedt, who had entered the room meanwhile, "if you had been a learned man. For I have heard my blessed father say a hundred times that like should mate with like, and that a master-carpenter's daughter should marry some one skilled in her father's trade."