The pastor’s wife had seen at once that the grandfather had recognized his grandson, and as the latter was standing before him, she gently urged her husband and children, as well as Marianne, out of the room and closed the door after her; and outside, in the long passage, she let the interested crowd ask their loud questions, and give their loudest answers, undisturbed.  But when the colonel, holding Erick by the hand, came out of the study, she at once made an open path for them through the assembled people, to bring them upstairs to the quiet reception room, where at last the family and their guest could be among themselves.  Here the beaming grandfather went first to the lady of the house, and then to the master and then again to the lady, and every time he took each by both their hands with indescribable heartiness and kept on saying:  “I have no words, but thanks, eternal thanks!” And all at once he saw Sally’s head peeping out from behind her mother.  He suddenly took it between his two hands and cried:  “There is, I believe, the great friend and defender of my boy.  Well, now will you forgive me?”

Sally pulled one of his hands down and pressed a hearty kiss on it, and now the colonel tenderly stroked her hair and said:  “Such good friends are worth a great deal!”

But when he expressed his intention to start at once with Erick, there arose great opposition, and this time the mother distinguished herself in opposition against such quick separation.  The grandfather of her Erick ought to spend at least one night beneath her roof, and give the family the chance of learning to know him a little better and to have Erick another day in their midst.

All the children as well as Erick supported, louder and always louder, the mother’s request, and the beleaguered grandfather had to give in.  Ritz and Edi ran with much delight and noise down the stairs to seat themselves proudly in the coach, and thus drive to the inn, where both must tell to the guests present, who had changed their consultation place from the church to the inn, what they knew of the strange gentleman.  And so it came about that on the same Sunday afternoon, all Upper and Lower Wooders, as well as the Middle Lotters, knew Erick’s family and fate, and they had to talk loud and zealously before every door, over this change of luck that had come to Erick.

In the parsonage, too, the evening was spent with unusually animated conversation.  How much had to be told to the grandfather of the happenings of the last and all former days, and Erick had to throw in a question now and then, which referred to the distant estate, for his thoughts always travelled back to that spot.

“Is Mother’s white pony still alive, Grandfather?” he once suddenly asked.

The beautiful pony had long been put away, was the answer.  “But you shall have one just like your mother’s, my boy.  I can now bear the sight of it again,” the grandfather said.