them to
send Ernst on that errand. She accompanied Bertha to her room, and
stroking the light locks of little Victor, whom she had taken on her
lap, said, "He looked just as you do when he was a little boy, except
that he had blue eyes."

"Yes," said Bertha, "my husband has often noticed that Victor bears
great resemblance to Ernst."

"And Uncle Ernst promised me a horse," said Victor.

"Did he?" said my wife, with pleased looks: "If he did that, it is all
right, but sad enough for all. Still, others have their burdens to bear
as well as we."

Martella's first meeting with Bertha as well as with Annette, resulted
in mutual attraction.

Bertha was obliged to tell Martella all that she knew about Ernst, and
while she was holding the hand of the strange child, the latter must
have felt a consciousness of the candor and straightforwardness of
Bertha's character, for she looked into her face with sparkling eyes.

Martella asked Bertha whether Ernst had sent the broken ring by her.

Bertha said he had not.

She removed a ring from her finger and offered it to Martella, who
declined it.

When Annette offered both her hands to Martella, and said that she had
for a long while been anxious to make her acquaintance, Martella was
quite confused, and looked down towards the ground. When she raised her
head, her eyes fell on a light green necktie which Annette wore.

"How pretty it is!" were her first words.

Annette immediately removed the tie, and fastened it about Martella's
neck.

"It is quite warm, yet," said Martella; and Annette replied, "How
lovely! Let us regard that as a good omen."

When Bertha, who rarely gave way to sentiment, returned and joined us
again, she said, "Let us now be thrice as kind and loving to one
another as we have been, and be indulgent with each other's moods. It
is only by such means that we can manage to live through these terrible
times."

Bertha and her daughter Clotilde, a charming, graceful child about nine
years of age, were so clever in anticipating every wish of my wife's,
that, although it had always been her wont to be serving others and
providing for their comfort, she was now obliged to let them have their
own way.

Martella seemed almost inseparable from Rothfuss, and Victor was always
with the two. He accompanied them out to the fields and into the woods;
and it was difficult to say which of the two was the happier, Rothfuss
the old, or Victor the young, child.

I