The fellow looked in amazement at the kindly speaker.
"I don't exactly understand you, sir, but you seem to mean well."
"What makes you think so?" asked Johannes,--"you do not know me."
"Oh, why, you look honest and good, sir," said the peasant, looking frankly into Johannes's face.
"Then believe what I say, when I tell you that you do Fräulein Hartwich great wrong. I have known her from childhood, and I know that she is good and kind!"
Johannes sent an earnest glance towards the castle, which they were passing. An elderly woman was just opening a window in an upper story.
"Look!" cried the peasant, "that is her housekeeper, Frau Willmers. The Fräulein is just getting up--it is nine o'clock."
"God bless your awakening!" Johannes breathed softly to himself.
And, borne on the breeze of morning and the fragrance of flowers, the blessing was wafted up to the girl, who, weary with her night-watch, was reposing by the open window. She laid her head upon the sill, and the fragrant summer air fanned her brow. Johannes's words floated around her in a sea of light and warmth, and she felt them without hearing them. At last she opened her burning eyelids, and looked abroad, seeing everything at first through the gray, misty veil which weariness spread before her eyes,--but gradually was revealed in its full splendour the sunny picture, above which arched the clear, cloudless firmament. She arose and leaned out with a deep sigh of pain. She knew no happiness but that of gratified ambition,--she could imagine no other, and therefore desired no other, for we cannot desire that of which we have no conception,--and yet, in the sunlight laughing around her, in the gloom of night, in the beauty of the valley and the grandeur of the mountains, a promise of a far different happiness beckoned to her, and she pined in longing for it without recognising it. Yes, from every voice of nature, from the song of birds, the murmur of the brook, the roaring of the tempest, and the muttering of the thunder, a call was ringing in her ears, she knew not whence or whither, but she would willingly have plunged into the ocean to follow it.
"There is no surer means of preventing all aimless desires than study, nothing better to prevent all abstract dreaming than absorption in some specialty," her uncle had told her when he suspected her of moods like that we have just described. "If you long to grasp the whole, first grasp a part,--if you thirst to fly to heaven, remember that the observatory is the only way thither,--if you desire to feel the warm throb of life, you can find it nowhere so satisfactorily as at the dissecting-table."