for they could not fail to see that it was not the freshness of youth, but a transformation, that gave her slender form and beaming eyes this peculiar appearance.  All who observed her closely saw this, but Effi herself did not.  Her whole attention was engaged by the happy feeling at being back in this place, to her so charmingly peaceful, and living reconciled with those whom she had always loved and who had always loved her, even during the years of her misery and exile.

She busied herself with all sorts of things about the home and attended to the decorations and little improvements in the household.  Her appreciation of the beautiful enabled her always to make the right choice.  Reading and, above all, study of the arts she had given up entirely.  “I have had so much of it that I am happy to be able to lay my hands in my lap.”  Besides, it doubtless reminded her too much of her days of sadness.  She cultivated instead the art of contemplating nature with calmness and delight, and when the leaves fell from the plane trees, or the sunbeams glistened on the ice of the little pond, or the first crocuses blossomed in the circular plot, still half in the grip of winter—­it did her good, and she could gaze on all these things for hours, forgetting what life had denied her, or, to be more accurate, what she had robbed herself of.

Callers were not altogether a minus quantity, not everybody shunned her; but her chief associates were the families at the schoolhouse and the parsonage.

It made little difference that the Jahnke daughters had left home; there could have been no very cordial friendship with them anyhow.  But she found a better friend than ever in old Mr. Jahnke himself, who considered not only all of Swedish Pomerania, but also the Kessin region as Scandinavian outposts, and was always asking questions about them.  “Why, Jahnke, we had a steamer, and, as I wrote to you, I believe, or may perhaps have told you, I came very near going over to Wisby.  Just think, I almost went to Wisby.  It is comical, but I can say ‘almost’ with reference to many things in my life.”

“A pity, a pity,” said Jahnke.

“Yes, indeed, a pity.  But I actually did make a tour of Ruegen.  You would have enjoyed that, Jahnke.  Just think, Arcona with its great camping place of the Wends, that is said still to be visible.  I myself did not go there, but not very far away is the Hertha Lake with white and yellow water lilies.  The place made one think a great deal of your Hertha.”

“Yes, yes, Hertha.  But you were about to speak of the Hertha Lake.”

“Yes, I was.  And just think, Jahnke, close by the lake stood two large shining sacrificial stones, with the grooves still showing, in which the blood used to run off.  Ever since then I have had an aversion for the Wends.”

“Oh, pardon me, gracious Lady, but they were not Wends.  The legends of the sacrificial stones and the Hertha Lake go back much, much farther, clear back before the birth of Christ.  They were the pure Germans, from whom we are all descended.”