to her parents
with a quick elastic step, to bid them good morning, they looked at
each other with joyful surprise--with joyful surprise and yet at the
same time with sadness, for they could not fail to see that it was not
the freshness of youth, but a transformation, that gave her slender
form and beaming eyes this peculiar appearance. All who observed her
closely saw this, but Effi herself did not. Her whole attention was
engaged by the happy feeling at being back in this place, to her so
charmingly peaceful, and living reconciled with those whom she had
always loved and who had always loved her, even during the years of
her misery and exile.

She busied herself with all sorts of things about the home and
attended to the decorations and little improvements in the household.
Her appreciation of the beautiful enabled her always to make the right
choice. Reading and, above all, study of the arts she had given up
entirely. "I have had so much of it that I am happy to be able to lay
my hands in my lap." Besides, it doubtless reminded her too much of
her days of sadness. She cultivated instead the art of contemplating
nature with calmness and delight, and when the leaves fell from the
plane trees, or the sunbeams glistened on the ice of the little pond,
or the first crocuses blossomed in the circular plot, still half in
the grip of winter--it did her good, and she could gaze on all these
things for hours, forgetting what life had denied her, or, to be more
accurate, what she had robbed herself of.

Callers were not altogether a minus quantity, not everybody shunned
her; but her chief associates were the families at the schoolhouse and
the parsonage.

It made little difference that the Jahnke daughters had left home;
there could have been no very cordial friendship with them anyhow. But
she found a better friend than ever in old Mr. Jahnke himself, who
considered not only all of Swedish Pomerania, but also the Kessin
region as Scandinavian outposts, and was always asking questions about
them. "Why, Jahnke, we had a steamer, and, as I wrote to you, I
believe, or may perhaps have told you, I came very near going over to
Wisby. Just think, I almost went to Wisby. It is comical, but I can
say 'almost' with reference to many things in my life."

"A pity, a pity," said Jahnke.

"Yes, indeed, a pity. But I actually did make a tour of Ruegen. You
would have enjoyed that, Jahnke. Just think, Arcona with its great
camping plac