Whoever saw her felt glad, for it seemed to him as if he had met with a piece of good fortune, but no one sought to make her acquaintance, although the doctor had not omitted to take her, soon after their arrival, to call upon his relatives and the dignitaries of the city.  People had asked them at first to dine, but as Melchior always refused because of his wife’s delicate health, they did not press the matter; for no one could talk with her as she understood no German, while all who heard her light cough felt that the doctor was right to guard his fragile treasure so carefully.

When the few matrons who visited her called upon her, instead of finding her in the kitchen or the cellar, they found her lying upon the sofa with a book or her guitar in her hands, or perhaps playing with her little boy, and the amiable ones among them explained it by her pale face and delicate air, but the severer ones said that such idleness was the Italian custom and they pitied the doctor.

What the feminine relatives of the doctor chiefly resented was the fact that the young couple seemed to get on so perfectly well without them.  Happiness indeed shone in their eyes, and the silent doctor seemed to find his tongue when he walked in the woods and fields with his beloved wife.  The notary Anselmus Winckler was also loud in his praises of both of them.  He was the only person who ever joined them in their walks through the woods, and as he had been for several years Melchior’s companion at school in Bologna, and had there learned to speak the sweet Italian tongue, he could talk with Frau Blanca like one of her own countrymen.  He was a convivial person, and when he was in the tavern, or dining with a friend, he would expatiate on how learned the doctor was in all the secrets of nature and how well Dr. Vitali, Frau Bianca’s father, had known how to cultivate her appreciation of the good and the beautiful.  To hear her questions and her husband’s tender and wise replies was a pleasure unspeakable.

If the weather were fine the doctor would sometimes go out in the mornings also, and then he liked best to take his young wife to the Ueberhell garden outside the Petersthor, and show her what rare herbs and fruit-trees his father and grandfather had planted, and Frau Bianca amused herself by gathering the flowers, or helping her child to pick the ripe cherries and early pears.

In Bologna she had found it difficult to entice her husband away from his work, indeed her own father, his master, had held him back, and now she rejoiced that in the new home he was willing to give her so many hours of his time, moreover—­he had confessed it to her—­instead of the elixir, which she had been taught from childhood to regard as the worthiest object of research, he was seeking for a medicine that should cure her.