that which he had hoped for in his youth,
but most sweet and real--that God's goodness had given him in these his
later years.

Andreas truly was old Andreas now. As men's lives go, his age was not
great; but sorrow had made him, as it had made many another man, far
older than the mere number of years which he had lived. No, great store
of strength had been his at the beginning, and the heart-break that he
had suffered that day of his landing in the New World, when faith and
love and hope all died together at a single blow, was less a sentimental
figure than a physical reality. A like pang, yet not so keen, had
wrenched him when he first came to know of Christine's sharp trial of
poverty, and another seized him in the night-time following that sad day
when she passed away from earth. And now of late, without any cause at
all, these pangs had come again. Andreas was glad that they had come
always when he was alone; for the pain was too searching to be wholly
hidden, and his strong desire was that Roschen should be spared all
knowledge of his suffering. In his own mind he perceived quite clearly
what before long must come to pass. And it was a good happening, he
thought, that in Gottlieb Brekel and Aunt Hedwig, and the excellent Herr
Sohnstein, who, being a lawyer, could care well for the little store in
the bank and for the little house that Andreas now owned, Roschen had
such stanch and worthy friends. The only signs of these thoughts which
Roschen perceived was that her father grew much keener in the matter of
selling his birds at high prices; and that she was somewhat seriously
reproved when, in her housekeeping or in her occasional expeditions
to the fine shops in Grand Street, she ventured upon any small
extravagance. But Roschen would laugh when thus reproved, and would
declare that her father, who long had been a glutton, was become a miser
already in his old age; whereat Andreas also would laugh, yet not quite
so heartily as Roschen liked to hear him laugh when she cracked her
little jokes upon him, and would say that sometimes a miser was not
thought by his heirs so bad a fellow when they found what a snug little
fortune he had left behind him all safe in the bank.

It was because of these thoughts, which he kept hidden from her, that
Andreas began to take a much more active interest in what Roschen had to
say from time to time about certain young men of her acquaintance.
The young man of whom she spoke most f