sighs, that she never, never could forget him. A Gothic
temple, made of sugar and adorned with numerous figures of saints,
which he had made for their marriage, as a sort of triumph of his art,
still stood in a state of good preservation under a glass case upon her
sideboard. Nevertheless rumor said of her that she had not always
harshly repulsed the numerous offers she had received as a widow,
though she had been too wise to give the slightest cause for public
gossip. Certain ecclesiastical gentlemen, who were in the habit of
going in and out of her house, gave her the best certificate of
character; and though she did not close her door to young artists, she
took care to see that they were proper, respectable people, who painted
church pictures with long robes, and did not wear their shirt-collars
after the fashion of too erratic genius; and that they held aloof from
all pagan theories of art. To this godly way of life she owed it that
her own godmother, the glove-maker's wife, had trusted her with "the
children" for a day, although some malicious people pretended to think
that to go gadding into the country was not exactly the thing for
well-preserved widows.

She was quite modestly dressed, but yet in such a way that her figure,
already somewhat inclined to _embonpoint_, was shown to the best
advantage. In her manner she kept a wise mean between the severe
dignity which a God-fearing woman of an uncertain age usually maintains
toward youthful giddiness, and a too free approval of the pranks that
danced through her godchild's head. At the same time she did not try to
keep the silent Felix from knowing that his slim, manly form had made
an impression on her; though she was wise enough to do it so slyly as
to give a motherly sort of aspect to her interest in him. It was only
when the ungrateful man, whose poor soul was quite unconscious of its
conquest, continued to walk at her side in complacent abstraction,
casting furtive glances all around to see whether he was running
directly in the way of her whom he must especially avoid--then only did
she withdraw her favor from him and bestow it upon the insignificant
Kohle, whom Rosenbusch had introduced to her as a painter of the
severest style, a disciple of the great Cornelius, and one whom she
needed only to make a better Christian in order to win in him a new
pillar of ecclesiastical art. Kohle submitted to it all with a most
patient smile, and really began to pay prono