“A suitor of the past,” replied Marie, smiling. “Did you not recognize him?”
“Have I ever known him? But what do we care, now that he has gone! I am not compelled to drive him off, nor yet to hang old Trude as a go-between, as Odysseus did the old woman of whom Homer tells us.”
Philip and Marie both laughed. It was the innocent childlike laughter with which happiness illumines even the gravest countenances, and which permits those who have been sorely tried, and have suffered greatly, to find the innocence of youth and the smile of childhood again on the threshold of paradise regained.
“Marie, how beautiful you are when you laugh! Then it seems as though all these years of sorrow had not been—as though we had only been dreaming, and now awake to find that we are again in the little room under the roof. You are once more my charming young scholar, and Professor Moritz has just come to give Miss von Leuthen a lesson in the Italian language. Yes, that is it, we are still the same; and see! there lie the flowers on your table, just as they were when old Trude conducted me to your room to give you your first lesson.”
He took a handful of flowers from the table and held them between his folded hands. “You dear flowers! She is your god and your goddess! Like God she made you of nothing, and, like the goddess Flora, she strews you over the pathway of humanity; but to-day you shall receive the most glorious reward for your existence—to-day you shall adorn her, my fair Flora!”
He sprang up, seized whole handfuls of violets, pinks, lilies, and forget-me-nots, and strewed them over Marie’s head, in her lap, and all over and about her.
“Let me strew your path with flowers for the future, my darling. May your tender little feet never more be wounded by the sharp stones! may you never again be compelled to journey over rough roads! Flowers shall spring up beneath your footsteps, and I will be the gardener who cultivates them.”
“You are my heaven-flower yourself, my imperial lily,” said she, extending her hands. He took them in his, pressed them to his lips, and then resumed his former seat at her feet.
“How handsome you are, Philip, and how strong you look, tanned by the sun of Italy and steeled by the combat with life! Misfortune has made a hero of you, my beloved. You are taller and prouder than you were.”
“And are you not a heroine, Marie, a victorious heroine?”