Her anger had fled; she appeared again all light and loveliness. He did not fail to observe a searching look which she directed upon him, but its meaning became clear to him only when, as he was taking leave, she said in a tone of humility: “Pardon my vehemence, Mr. Seraphin! Don't think me a bad girl.”
“There is nothing to be forgiven, Mechtild. You were indignant against godless wretches, and they who are not indignant against evil cannot themselves be good.”
“We are most heartily thankful for this visit,” spoke Holt. “I need not say that we will consider it a great happiness as often as you will be pleased to come.”
“Good-night!” returned the young man, and he walked away.
Deeply immersed in his thoughts, Seraphin went back to town. What he was thinking about, his diary does not record. But the excitement under which he had rushed forth was gone—dispelled by the magic of a rural sorceress. He walked on quietly like a man who seems filled with confidence in his own future. The recent painful impressions seemed to his mind to lie far back in the past; their place was taken up by beautiful anticipations which, like the aurora, shed soft and pleasing light upon his path. He halted frequently in a dream-like reverie to indulge the happiness with which his soul was flooded. The full moon, just peering over the hills, shed around him a mystic brightness that harmonized perfectly with the indefinable contentment of his heart, and seemed to be gazing quizzingly into the countenance of the young man, who almost feared to confess to himself that he had found an invaluable treasure.
As he stopped before the Palais Greifmann, all the bright spirits that had hovered round about him on the way back from the little whitewashed cottage, fled. He awoke from his dream, and, ascending the stairs with a feeling of discomfort, he entered his apartment, where his father sat awaiting him.
“At last,” spoke Mr. Conrad, looking up from a book. “You have kept me waiting a long time, my son.”
“I was in need of a good long walk, father, to get over what I witnessed this morning. The country air has dispelled all those horrible impressions. There is only one thing more required to make me feel perfectly well, dear father, which is that you will not insist on my allying myself to people who are utterly opposed to my way of thinking and feeling.”
“I understand and approve of your request, Seraphin. The impressions made on me, too, are exceedingly disagreeable. The advancement of which this town boasts is stupid, immoral, detestable. How this state of society has come about, is inexplicable to me who live secluded in the country. Society is diseased, fatally diseased. Many of the new views professed are sheer superstition, and their morality is a mere cloak for their corruption and wickedness. All the powers of progress so-called are actively at work to subvert all the safeguards of society. And what your diary reports of Louise, I have found fully confirmed. Though it cost the sacrifice of a long cherished plan, a son of mine shall never become the husband of a progressionist woman.”
“O father! how deeply do I thank you!” cried the youth, carried away by his feelings.