"He has often spoken of you since the evening when we met at that inn. I was so troubled at that time, so unhappy. Oh, good Uncle Rudolf, he has guided my poor life too. Oh, if you only knew him through and through, Mr. Unwirrsch!"
"I hope to learn to know him and appreciate his full worth!" cried Hans. "If I stay long enough in this house——"
Franziska again laid her fingers on her lips as if frightened.
"You must not talk so much about Uncle Rudolf in this house," she said. "My Aunt does not like him. It is very sad."
"Oh!" sighed Hans Unwirrsch and a moment later the Lieutenant's Fränzchen had left him alone in his new quarters. He could look at them more closely and gaze out the window after he had examined the four walls and the furniture. There was nothing extraordinary about the blue-papered walls, the four chairs, the table, the hat-tree, the little sofa and the little round cast-iron stove; but the view from the window was not so easily forgotten.
In the middle of the lawn the fountain was now playing merrily with a shining brass ball. There was the ornamental iron fence which separated the Privy Councillor's property from the public street of the big city. There was something wonderful to Hans Unwirrsch in the view of this promenade with its throng of carriages, riders and pedestrians and he waited in vain for the variegated stream to come to an end. And there, beyond the driveway, riding and foot paths, was the wood-like park with its long straight avenues into which one looked as into a peep-show. And how beautiful that must all be when the trees were green! Truly, the hope of this green to come was in itself some consolation for the grayness of the present.
The porter from the "Green Tree" now came with a greeting from Lieutenant Götz and brought the tutor his traveling bag, thus tearing him away from his observations at the window. He would have to write to the manager in Kohlenau for the things he had left behind there. As Hans laid a Greek pocket edition of the New Testament on the table a card fell out of it on which could be read in fine steel engraving:
Dr. Théophile Stein,
25 Hedwig Street.
Hans Unwirrsch had no more time to dream; he had to think and deliberate as well as he could with his mind baffled by an entanglement of persons and mutual relationships. Moses Freudenstein and Franziska Götz, Franziska and the mistress of the house, the mistress of the house and Kleophea, the Privy Councillor, Jean in green and gold;—bellum omnium contra omnes, and Hans Unwirrsch, Candidatus theologiæ and tutor in the midst of them all! That was a state of affairs in which a man was certainly justified in putting his hand to his forehead like some one who has been turned round many times in a circle blindfolded and after the bandage has been removed feels by no means steady on his feet and knows still less what to think of his surroundings.
Hans Unwirrsch, too, felt irresistibly the need of winding up some of the springs in his being and tightening some of the screws. He read a chapter in the New Testament and followed that with a page in a pocket edition of Epictetus. He was then able to meet the stately Jean's eyes with greater composure when the latter came to call him to dinner and let fall the remark that it was customary to wear white gloves to that function.