reached the house and entered the dark hall
into which no light could enter except the little from the stairway,
she had a sudden feeling of fear and said to herself: "There is no
such pale, yellow light in Hohen-Cremmen."

A few times during the days in Hohen-Cremmen she had longed for the
"Haunted house," but on the whole her life there had been full of
happiness and contentment. To be sure, she had not known what to
make of Hulda, who was not taking kindly to her role of waiting
for a husband or fiance to turn up. With the twins, however, she
got along much better, and more than once when she played ball or
croquet with them she entirely forgot that she was married. Those
were happy moments. Her chief delight was, as in former days, to
stand on the swing board as it flew through the air and gave her
a tingling sensation, a shudder of sweet danger, when she felt she
would surely fall the next moment. When she finally sprang out of
the swing, she went with the two girls to sit on the bench in front
of the schoolhouse and there told old Mr. Jahnke, who joined them,
about her life in Kessin, which she said was half-hanseatic and
half-Scandinavian, and anything but a replica of Schwantikow and
Hohen-Cremmen.

Such were the little daily amusements, to which were added occasional
drives into the summery marsh, usually in the dog-cart. But Effi liked
above everything else the chats she had almost every morning with her
mother, as they sat upstairs in the large airy room, while Roswitha
rocked the baby and sang lullabies in a Thuringian dialect which
nobody fully understood, perhaps not even Roswitha. Effi and her
mother would move over to the open window and look out upon the park,
the sundial, or the pond with the dragon flies hovering almost
motionless above it, or the tile walk, where von Briest sat beside the
porch steps reading the newspapers. Every time he turned a page he
took off his nose glasses and greeted his wife and daughter. When he
came to his last paper, usually the _Havelland Advertiser_, Effi went
down either to sit beside him or stroll with him through the garden
and park. On one such occasion they stepped from the gravel walk over
to a little monument standing to one side, which Briest's grandfather
had erected in memory of the battle of Waterloo. It was a rusty
pyramid with a bronze cast of Bluecher in front and one of Wellington
in the rear.

"Have you any such walks in Kessin?" said von Briest, "an