He paused and let her hand fall, to take out his handkerchief and wipe his forehead. The little fair haired deceiver thought it more decorous to keep him in suspense a short time, though her whole heart drew her toward him and she would gladly have thrown herself into his arms at once.
"What are you talking about, Herr Franzelius?" she replied, half pouting. "You have loved me, and now--now it's over. Because you're going away, you will leave me behind like a troublesome piece of property that won't go into your trunk?"
"Oh! Reginchen," he exclaimed, suddenly gazing at her so tenderly that she blushed and cast down her eyes, "you're only joking. You know very well what I mean, and that I shall never cease to love you far more than any one else. If I tear myself away, believe me it's not only because I should think it unprincipled--with my uncertain future and the destiny which may be in store for me--to ask one so young and so unused to want and privation--"
"Oh!" she interrupted, "is that all? I've always heard that the principal thing is for people to love each other. Doesn't Annchen von Tharau's song, which you once wrote out for me, say:
"No matter what tempests may burst overhead,
We'll cling to each other our pathway to tread--?"
"My darling," He exclaimed, fairly beside himself with delight, while a ray of surprise and joy flashed over his gloomy face, "is this true? You have--you have remembered this--applied it to me, to us both? Oh! I never ventured to hope for so much. My precious Reginchen! And now--how happy I should be--if I only dared. Tell me once more, dear precious child, is it true? You would have gone with me, if I had proposed it--and your parents--But no, tell me nothing! It can do no good, and will only make my hard task still harder." He sank down on a stool by the table, and buried his face in his broad hands. Reginchen watched him in silence. She could not understand his behavior. What was it that stood in the way? Why could it "do no good," this acknowledgement of her love, and her willing offer to go out into the wide world with him?
Suddenly he started up and approaching her said: "Promise me, dear Reginchen, that you'll try to forget what I have said. I ought to have kept silence; but my feelings overpowered me. And now farewell and make him happy. He deserves it more than I, he also loves you truly and fondly--though certainly no one in the whole world can hold you dearer than I."
He pressed his lips to her hands, then strove to release them and rush out of the workshop. But Reginchen stopped him. "Dear Herr Franzelius," she said, "if you're in earnest and really love me, why do you grieve me so, by telling me things I don't understand, and asking me to make somebody else happy when I do not even know of whom you're speaking? I love you too, and if it were only my parents--but speak; I don't understand a single word of all you have said."
He paused at the door and looked at her in astonishment. "Is it possible?" said he. "That you have no idea of whom I mean? That you see him daily, and yet have never perceived what an impression you have made on his heart? I noticed it long ago, and suffered deeply in consequence. Oh! Reginchen, you don't know what it is to grudge such a friend the love of such a girl, because one loves her himself! And yet I know what I owe him, how deeply, perhaps fatally, it would wound him, if you and I--"
"Merciful Heaven!" she suddenly exclaimed, "no, no, it's impossible--you can't mean Herr Walter!"