Meanwhile, the subject of all these remarks stood in the centre of the room, blushing at the compliments paid her on all sides.
“Dear me, good people, I shall have to run away if you go on like that,” she cried at last. “I have been so happy here,” she added, turning to Fritz. “It’s the first time I’ve known what home was since my mother died.”
“Poor child,” said Madame Dort, opening her arms. “Come here, I’ll be your mother now.”
“Ah, that’s just what I’ve longed for!” exclaimed Fritz rapturously. “Madaleine, will you be her daughter in reality?”
The girl did not reply in words, but she gave him one look, and then hid her face in the widow’s bosom.
“Poor Eric,” said the widow presently, resigning Madaleine to the care of Fritz, who was nothing loth to take charge of her—the two retreating to a corner and sitting down side by side, having much apparently to say to each other, if such might be surmised from their bent heads and whispered conversation. “If he were but here, my happiness would now be almost complete!”
“Yes,” chimed in Lorischen as she bustled out of the room, Madame Dort following her quietly, so as to leave the lovers to themselves—“the dear flaxen-haired sailor laddie, with his merry ways and laughing eyes. I think I can see him now before me! Ah, it is just nineteen months to the day since he sailed away on that ill-fated voyage, you remember, mistress?”
But, she need not have asked the question. Madame Dort had counted every day since that bright autumn morning when she saw her darling for the last time at the railway station. It was not likely that she would forget how long he had been absent!
Later on, when the excitement of coming home to his mother and meeting with Madaleine had calmed down, Fritz, having ceased to be a soldier, his services not being any longer required with the Landwehr, turned his attention to civil employment; for, now, with the prospect of marrying before him, it was more urgent than ever that he should have something to do in order to occupy his proper position as bread-winner of the family, the widow’s means being limited and it being as much as she could do to support herself and Lorischen out of her savings, without having to take again to teaching—which avocation, indeed, her health of late years had rendered her unable to continue, had she been desirous of resuming it again.
Madaleine, of course, could have gone out as a governess, Madame Dort being, probably, easily able to procure her a situation in the family of one of her former pupils; or she might have resumed the position of a hospital nurse, for which she had been trained at Darmstadt, having been taken on as an assistant in the convalescent home established in that town by the late Princess Alice of Hesse, when the Baroness Stolzenkop turned her adrift. But Fritz would not hear of Madaleine’s leaving his mother.