Saxe Holm's Stories, Second Series. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt Jackson

      Margaret's face flushed with pleasure. The matter was evidently settled. It was already beginning to be a matter of hospitality in these kindly hearts, and the only question was how they could make her happiest and most comfortable. The children danced with joy, and taking Margaret's hands in theirs, they drew her towards the stairway, saying:

      "Come, see Uncle Karl's room; it is the nicest in the house."

      It was, indeed, a lovely room, with its one window looking out on the great blue lake.

      "It is too small," said Annette, as she stood with Margaret on the threshold; "but there is also this closet," and she threw open a door into a second ​still smaller room, also with one window to the east.

      "Oh!" exclaimed Margaret. "Can you spare them both? That will be perfect. My good friends, I cannot thank you enough."

      Wilhelm looked at Margaret with a steadfast, half-dreamy gaze. The German nature is a strangely magnetic one, under all its phlegmatic and prosaic exterior.

      "I have a belief that it is I and my house who are laid under debt by you, teacher," he said, with singular earnestness.

      So it was settled that Margaret should come to live with the Reutners, and should have Karl's room till he returned from the war.

      She wished to come at once, but Wilhelm insisted on a week's interval. Annette looked puzzled; she knew of no reason for the delay; but Wilhelm was firm, and Margaret did not press the matter.

      Seven days later, when Margaret went home again, with Annettechen and Mariska—this time really going home—she hardly knew the little rooms. Wilhelm had painted the walls of a soft gray; he had taken away the closet door, made the door-way into an arch, and hung it with curtains of plain gray cloth, of the same shade as the walls. A narrow strip of plain crimson paper bordered the rooms; a set of plain book shelves on the wall were edged with the same crimson paper. A small table, with a crimson cloth, and a comfortable ​arm-chair, also of crimson, stood in the room which had been called the closet. Under each window he had put a larger balcony shelf, and filled it with gay flowers, such as were on the shelves below.

      Margaret's eyes filled with tears. She turned, and saw Wilhelm and Annette standing behind her, their faces glowing with welcome and hope that she would be pleased.

      "Do not try to say that you like it, teacher," said Wilhelm; "we see in your eyes that you are more glad than we had hoped we could make you." And with a delicacy which touched Margaret even more deeply than she had been touched by the adorning of her rooms, he drew Annette away, and left her alone.

      One month from this day, Wilhelm, Annette, and Margaret were sitting alone in the little sitting-room. The children had gone to bed. It was a sultry evening. Annette had put out the large lamp, and Wilhelm was reading the newspaper by the light of a candle in one of the Tyrolean candlesticks. Suddenly he groaned aloud, dropped the candlestick, and fell back in his chair. The candle was extinguished, and they were left in darkness. Helplessly the two women groped for another light, Wilhelm's heavy breathing terrifying them more and more every moment, and poor Annette crying:—

      "Wilhelm, oh, my Wilhelm! He is dead! He's dead!"

      Wilhelm Reutner was a strong and robust man. ​It was the first time in his life that he had ever lost his consciousness. But the fatal words, "Karl Reutner—killed," had flashed upon his eyes with an indescribable shock of surprise and anguish. He had not known that Karl's regiment was at Gettysburg. He was reading the accounts of the battle with no especial interest, and it was by accident that he had glanced at the lists of killed and wounded. When he came to himself he gasped out, "Karl, Karl!" and then fainted again.

      "Oh! our Karl is killed!" cried Annette; "it will kill my Wilhelm, too;" and she fell on her knees, clasping her husband's head to her bosom, and calling: "But, Wilhelm, thou hast the little ones, and thou hast me. Oh, do not die, darling!"

      He soon revived, but could not speak. He turned most piteous looks first at Annette, then at Margaret.

      "Yes, Mr. Reutner," said Margaret, who had taken up the paper, and saw the name, "we know it, too. It is your dear brother's name. But you must remember that these lists are often wrong. A great many people have been reported killed who have been only taken prisoners. I do not believe your brother is dead."

      Wilhelm groaned. Hope could find no place in his heart. "Oh why did I not compel him to stay at home?" he said. "What is this cursed country to us that we should die for it?"

      "Oh! yes," sobbed Annette, "we all knelt to ​Karl! Wilhelm had tears like the rain on his face, to beseech that he would let us pay that another man should go; but he said that the man with no wife should go to the fight, and he was angry at the last, even with Wilhelm.

      "I think your brother was very right," said Margaret quietly, taking Wilhelm's hand in hers; "if he were my own brother, even if he had been killed, I should still rejoice that he had been noble enough to give his life for the right."

      "For the Fatherland, yes," said Wilhelm; "but not for this land we need not to love. It is not anything to us, except that we must live. We are Germans; we are not of your blood;" and Wilhelm looked almost fiercely at Margaret.

      "All men are of one blood, when the fight is that all men may be free, my friend," said Margaret, still more quietly, with a voice trembling with sympathy, and yet firm with enthusiasm. "Whatever land it had been which first began the fight for freedom to all, I would send my brothers to die under its banners. I would go myself! But I do not believe your Karl is dead. I cannot tell why I have so strong a feeling that he is still alive, but I have no doubt of it—none!"

      Margaret's hopefulness was not shared by Wilhelm. He refused to listen to any of her suggestions. Weeks later a letter came from Karl's friend, Gustave Boehmer, who was in the same company, and was lying in the trench, next to Karl ​when he was shot. Wilhelm read the letter aloud, without a tear or a sob, and said, turning to Margaret, "You see the brother's knowledge was more sure than the stranger's. I knew in that first second that my Karl was gone."

      A black ribbon was twined in the evergreen wreath on Karl's violin, a wreath of white immortelles put around Karl's picture on the wall, and the little, grief-stricken household went on with its daily life, brave and resigned. But Wilhelm Reutner's face was altered from that day; night after night the little children gazed wistfully into his eyes, missing the joyous look from his smile and the merry ring from his voice. Night after night poor Annette had cried as she had cried on the night when the sad news came, "Liebling, thou hast the little ones and thou hast me: do not die for the love of Karl." And Wilhelm answered, "Be patient, I had not thought it could be so hard. The good God will make it easier, in time. It must be that the twin bond is strong after death as it is before birth. I feel my Karl all the while more near than when he was alive."

      On the wall of Karl's room, now Margaret's, there hung an oval picture of the beautiful Königsee Lake in Bavaria. On the margin of the print was drawn, in rough crayon, a girl's head. It was a spirited drawing, and the head had great beauty. Around the picture was a wreath of edelweiss. Annette had told Margaret that this head was the ​portrait of a young girl in Ischl whom Karl had loved when they were little more than children. She had died just before Karl and Wilhelm had set out for America, and this rough and unfinished sketch, drawn by Karl one day, half in sport, when they were sailing on the Königsee, was the only memento he had of her. The edelweiss flowers Karl had gathered on the very glacier of the Watzman, the day before he bade good-by to his home.

      Ever since Margaret had occupied the room, she had found a special fascination in this picture; but now she was conscious of a new magnetism in it. Every morning the first rays of the rising sun slanted across this picture, bringing out into full relief each line of the girl's head, and still more, every fine, velvety fibre of the snowy petals of the edelweiss. The picture hung at the foot of the bed, and sometimes when Margaret first opened her eyes and saw this golden light on the lake and the girl's face and the edelweiss wreath, she fancied that there were rhythmic sounds in the light; that she heard voices fainter than faintest whispers, and yet clear and distinct as flute notes in the air, speaking words she did not understand. She grew almost afraid of the picture; it