"I nodded to him: 'Sleep well, Klaus!'
"'Is it not so?' he asked, holding me back.' You will write to Anna Maria that we are happy with one another; you will tell her how good and charming she is?'
"'Yes, my boy, and now, good-night.'
"Anna Maria's letters were brief and meagre; her handwriting very large and angular, as it is to-day. She wrote me that she was very well there, occupied a pair of pretty rooms, and was much with the abbess, who had been a friend of her mother. 'But I miss activity,' she added; 'a life on the sofa, in the company of stocking-knitting and books, is hateful to me; that is not resting.' A greeting for Klaus and Susanna was added.
"I answered her, writing that Klaus worshipped his wife and was happy.
"'May God keep him thus!' she answered laconically. She was not to be reached with that; she had no belief in a happiness with Susanna.
"Stürmer, who, as Anna Maria thought, was to come in April, was not yet here. He was a migratory bird, only without the regularity of one."
CHAPTER XVIII.
"May came on in the country in all its glory; the trees blossomed and the seeds sprouted, and Bütze lay as in a snowy sea. The sun laughed in the sky, as Susanna walked through the trim garden-paths on Klaus's arm. Now and then I saw her cross the court, with straw hat and parasol, in a light summer dress, and go a little way into the fields to meet him. The people stood still as she passed, the women and girls courtesied, the men made as deep a bow to her as to the rest of us from the house, and the children ran up to her in troops, and the sound of their 'Good-day, gracious Frau,' and Susanna's clear, laughing voice came up to me; her charms fairly bewitched everybody. Then she would return on her husband's arm, a great bouquet of field flowers in her hands, he leading his horse by the bridle and carrying her parasol and shawl; and her chatter and his deep voice, calling her a thousand pet names, reëchoed from the old walls when they had come into the house.