She looked back affectionately at him, and waved her hand to say good-bye, and then she walked steadily over the plank, with her light elastic step, and turned into one of the paths that led through the wood on the other side.
As long as she was to be seen, Walter looked after her; then he flung himself on the grass, with his face to the ground, in an agony of shame and grief, and self-reproach. He did not know that as soon as she was out of sight, her brave heart failed her; she stopped, and leaning her head against the stem of a young tree, she too relieved herself by a flood of tears.
The day was fading into twilight; in the Meister's room it had grown too dark for him to do anything until the lamp was brought. Putting by the watercolor sketch of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, in which he had been making some alterations in the foreground with a piece of chalk, he was just about to exchange his favorite old dressing gown with the sheepskin, for a more appropriate garment for an evening walk, when the door was opened noiselessly, and Helen came in, with a serene countenance, and an unfaltering voice that belied all her agitations of the morning.
"Good evening, brother. I have been longer away than I expected. I had a little piece of business to do on my way home, that should have been settled long ago--Christel has been taking good care of you, I hope? How have you been? better?"
The unusual friendliness of her manner took him by surprise, and stopped the reproaches that had been ready on his lips. "How does the gallery get on?" he asked, instead of answering. "You will have been standing chattering there so long, that there will not have been much work done."
"I left the gallery about twelve o'clock;" she said with a faint blush. "If I had not gone astray among the woods, and done that business on my way back, I should have been here ever so long ago. After all, it would not so much signify, if the work were to last a few days longer. The grounds are hardly planned, and the gallery will certainly be finished in a week. Have you heard whether that assistant is to be counted on?"
"Not yet, why do you ask?"
She took a chair and seated herself with her back to the light. "I will tell you why," she said. "I have been thinking over what you said the other day, and I begin to see that you were right, when you said it was time for Walter to be sent from home; I know him too well, not to see that for him, it would be waste of time and talents, to go on plodding as he is doing now, in this narrow sphere of action. If he is ever to attain the fall development of which he is capable, we must transplant him to a more congenial soil. However, I am aware that you would find it hard to keep him in a strange place, unless he were to earn his own livelihood by his present trade; and that would be hard on him, for he takes no pleasure in it, and will take still less, if you send him among strangers."
She paused, for her voice was failing her; he stood at the other window, looking away from her, and drawing upon the vapoury panes with his finger.