lady, too, insisted on shaking
hands with him, but received only his two left hand fingers. Most happy
was Lenz, when he came, to find everything so amicably settled. The one
drawback to his pleasure was having Pilgrim at table, after the
language he had used the night before. But even that feeling passed off
at last, under the influence of Pilgrim's perfect self-possession.

The skies frowned upon Lenz's betrothal. It rained incessantly for
days. An ugly drizzle kept on all the time, like a monstrous talker,
who never comes to a period. Lenz naturally spent much of his time at
the Lion, which was so comfortably arranged that he could either be as
retired as in a private house, or could sit in a "market-place with a
fire in it," as he once called the large public room, with its sixteen
tables. "That is capital," said Annele; "I must repeat that to my
father. He enjoys a good joke."

"It is not worth while. If I say it to you, that is quite enough. Don't
let it go further."

Lenz went up and down the long, and now almost impassable, footway
between the Morgenhalde and the Lion as if he were only stepping from
one room into another. All who met him, men and women, stopped and
congratulated. "You look as if you had grown taller since your
engagement," some would say. Lenz's bearing had, in fact, been more
erect and proud of late than ever before. He smiled when persons said
to him, "You stand high in the market, for the sort of wife a man gets
is the test of his worth." "Without meaning to intrude upon others'
concerns, I must say I never supposed Annele would remain in the
village. It was always said she would marry a hotel-keeper in
Baden-Baden, or the engineer. You may laugh, for you are a precious
lucky fellow."

Lenz took no offence at being thought the lesser of the two; but, on
the contrary, was proud of Annele's modesty in choosing him. He could
not help saying sometimes, when he was sitting with her and her mother
in their private room, the old man looking in occasionally, and
growling out some of his pithy sentences: "Thank Heaven for once more
giving me parents, and such parents! I have started life afresh. It
seems incredible that I should be actually at home in the Lion inn. How
grand it looked to my childish eyes when the upper story was added and
plate-glass put in all the windows! We children used to think the
castle at Karlsruhe could not be more magnificent. I remember seeing
the golden lion hung out