Margaret sighed. Almost she regretted this wealth. It was not thus she had pictured her life with Karl. But her love of beauty, of culture, of art, was too strong for her to be long reluctant that the fullness of life should come to her.
"Oh Karl! Karl!" she said, "I cannot believe that I am to have you, and all else in life besides. Dear one, I do not deserve it."
Karl was lying at her feet, his head resting on her knees, as he had bowed it when he first knew that she loved him; only that now he dared to gaze steadily into her eyes. He did not reply for some moments, then he said:—
"The good God knows, my Margaret. Perhaps there will come sorrow for you, if it needs for his Heaven that you be more of angel than you are. But for my love, that is only like the daisies. It is enough that it can make a beautiful ground where you walk."
Since these things which I have written, many years have gone by, and have not yet brought sorrow to Margaret. The windows of her beautiful home look out on the blue lake; and into the nursery where her golden-haired children sleep, the morning sun sends its first beams, as it used to send them into her tiny room, in Wilhelm Reutner's house.
On the wall of Margaret's own room hangs the picture of Königsee, and the head of the shadowy maiden of Ischl still wreathed with edelweiss blossoms.
