for his bride. But wherever he turned his eyes, they fell on the traces of her activity. How charmingly arranged and cosy was his room; she had an eye for these things, and no detail escaped her devoted attention. Yes, he might well go to the ends of the earth to find one like her! His eyes fell on the cradle over which he had so often seen her bend—the sight of it stung him to the quick, and his sorrow mastered him completely. Why was it that she had gone? What had driven her away? It was that she had valued the memory of his own child’s mother more than he had done.
‘And if she were a thousand times in the wrong . . .’ he at last cried so impulsively that the servant who was silently weeping where she sat by the cradle, jumped up in alarm.
‘Hasn’t she deserved that I should be indulgent with her? I have been blaming her for her obstinacy, but when she refused one suitor after another, although she had not the least hope of our ever being married, I was glad enough of her obstinacy. It pleased me mightily, and I called it steadfastness, and praised her for it more than for anything else. What other girl would have forgiven me for
