"I am afraid I was so," cried Lenore.
"Now, you have had to bear heavy trials, and the present looks serious too; and if I may venture to say so, dear lady, I think you will find here just what the baroness has acquired in the great world—dignity and self-control. I often think that you are changed already."
"Was I, then, an unbearable little savage formerly?" asked Lenore, laughing in the midst of her tears, and looking at Anton with girlish archness.
He had hard work not to tell her how lovely she was at that moment; but he valiantly conquered the inclination, and said, as coolly as he could, "Not so bad as that, dear lady."
"And do you know what you are?" asked Lenore, playfully. "You are, as Eugene writes, a little schoolmaster."
"So that is what he has written!" cried Anton, enlightened.
Lenore grew grave at once. "Do not let us speak of him. As soon as I heard his letter, I came here to tell you that I trust you as I do no one on earth, if it be not my mother; that I shall always trust you as long as I live; that nothing could shake my faith in you; that you are the only friend that we have in our adversity; and that I could ask your pardon on my knees when any one offends you in word or even thought."
"Lenore, dear lady," cried Anton, joyously, "say no more."
"I will say," continued Lenore, "how I admire the self-possession with which you follow your own way and manage the people, and that it is you alone who keep any order on the estate, or can bring it into a better condition. This has been upon my mind to say; and now, Wohlfart, you know it."
"I thank you, lady," cried Anton; "such words make this a happy day. But I am not so self-possessed and efficient as you think, and every day I feel more and more that I am not the person to be really of service here. If I ever wish that you were not the baron's daughter, but his son, it is when I go over this property."