"What hopes have you of his recovery?" inquired our friend.
"It advances slowly," answered the physician, "yet it does advance. He continues his appointed occupations: we have now accustomed him to read the newspapers; he always looks for them with eagerness."
"I am curious about his songs," said Jarno.
"Of these I can engage to get you several," replied the doctor. "Our parson's eldest son, who frequently writes down his father's sermons, has, unnoticed by the harper, marked on paper many stanzas of his singing; out of which some songs have gradually been pieced together."
Next morning Jarno met our friend, and said to him, "We have to ask a kindness of you. Lydia must, for some time, be removed: her violent, unreasonable love and passionateness hinder the baron's recovery. His wound requires rest and calmness, though with his healthy temperament it is not dangerous. You see how Lydia tortures him with her tempestuous anxieties, her ungovernable terrors, her never-drying tears; and—Enough!" he added with a smile, after pausing for a moment, "our doctor expressly requires that she must quit us for a while. We have got her to believe that a lady, one of her most intimate friends, is at present in the neighborhood, wishing and expecting instantly to see her. She has been prevailed upon to undertake a journey to our lawyer's, which is but two leagues off. This man is in the secret: he will wofully lament that Fräulein Theresa should just have left him again; he will seem to think she may still be overtaken. Lydia will hasten after her, and, if you prosper, will be led from place to place. At last, if she insist on turning back, you must not contradict her; but the night will help you: the coachman is a cunning knave, and we shall speak with him before he goes. You are to travel with her in the coach, to talk to her, and manage the adventure."
"It is a strange and dubious commission that you give me," answered Wilhelm. "How painful is the sight of true love injured! And am I to be the instrument of injuring it? I have never cheated any person so; for it has always seemed to me, that if we once begin deceiving, with a view to good and useful purposes, we run the risk of carrying it to excess."
"Yet you cannot manage children otherwise," said Jarno.
"With children it may do," said Wilhelm; "for we love them tenderly, and take an open charge of them. But with our equals, in behalf of whom our heart is not so sure to call upon us for forbearance, it might frequently be dangerous. Yet do not think," he added, after pausing for a moment, "that I purpose to decline the task on this account. Honoring your judgment as I do, feeling such attachment to your noble friend, such eagerness to forward his recovery by whatever means, I willingly forget myself and my opinions. It is not enough that we can risk our life to serve a friend: in the hour of need, we should also yield him our convictions. Our dearest passions, our best wishes, we are bound to sacrifice in helping him. I undertake the charge; though it is easy to foresee the pain I shall have to suffer, from the tears, from the despair, of Lydia."
"And, for this, no small reward awaits you," answered Jarno: "Fräulein Theresa, whom you get acquainted with, is a lady such as you will rarely see. She puts many a man to shame; I may say, she is a genuine Amazon: while others are but pretty counterfeits, that wander up and down the world in that ambiguous dress."
Wilhelm was struck: he almost fancied that in Theresa he would find his Amazon again; especially as Jarno, whom he importuned to tell him more, broke off abruptly, and went away.