Erick soon felt quite at home in the parsonage.  He now went with the three children to the same school, shared Edi’s historical interest as long as the latter entertained him with it, which was the case on every walk to school, and as often as possible besides, for Edi found large gaps in the historical knowledge of his new friend and felt himself called upon to fill them in.  Erick was a good listener and often put questions which drove Edi to new, deep studies and which excited him so much that he had almost no other thoughts but Rome and Carthage.

With good-natured Ritz, Erick was also on good terms.  The little fellow ran after him wherever he went, and looked delighted when he saw him from afar; then he rushed at him and was always sure of a pleasant reception and jocular conversation, for Erick was always friendly, talkative and in good humor, and never buried in history books which often made Edi unhappy.  So Ritz spent all the time out of school either with Erick, or seeking him, which however sometimes cost him a good deal of time, for the very nearest friends, after all, were Erick and Sally.  The two could not be separated.  There was a great similarity in their temperaments, for what the one wanted the other liked also, and what the one did not like, did not please the other, and both liked nothing better than to go together up into the woods, where under the old fir-tree was the small bench on which they could sit and tell each other all they knew; or to go down to the foaming Woodbach and there, sitting on the stones near the bank, watch the tossing waves rush down.  They never seemed to lack topics of conversation.  Erick told about his mother, and how they had lived together, and of her beautiful singing; and Sally never grew weary of hearing again and again the same stories, and would keep on asking questions.

So they sat on their bench under the tree on the sunny Sunday afternoon in the first week in October, and Sally had just begun her questions.  This time she wanted to know why the mother had sent Erick to Lower Wood to school and not to Upper Wood, where all good people from Middle Lot came—­Kaetheli, for example.  Then Erick told her that his mother had asked Marianne about the schools, and after Marianne had explained everything to her, and that fewer children went to Lower Wood and mostly children who were not so well-known, then his mother had at once decided that he should go there.  “For you see, Sally, we were obliged to be alone and hide ourselves until I had become an honorable man.”

“But why?  I do not understand it at all,” Sally said somewhat impatiently.  “And then afterwards when you had become an honorable man, what did you want to do, if you did not know anyone?”

“I should very much like to tell it to you, Sally,” Erick answered very seriously, “but you would have to promise me that you would tell it to no human being; never, not if it should take many, many years.”