This confession sounded like angel voices.  It made me infinitely happy, yet I had strength to entreat Nenny to treasure this blissful hour with me as the fairest jewel of our lives, and then help me to fulfil the duty of parting from her.

But she took a different view of the future.  It was enough for her to know that my heart was hers.  If I died young, she would follow me.

And now the devout child, who firmly believed in a meeting after death face to face, permitted me a glimpse of the wondrous world in which she hoped to have her portion after the end here.

I listened in astonishment, with sincere emotion.  This was the faith which moved mountains, which brings heaven itself to earth.

Afterwards I again beheld the eyes with which, gazing into vacancy, she tried to conjure up before my soul these visions of hope from the realm of her fairest dreams—­they were those of Raphael’s Saint Cecilia in Bologna and Munich.  I also saw them long after Nenny’s death in one of Murillo’s Madonnas in Seville, and even now they rise distinctly before my memory.

To disturb this childish faith or check the imagination winged by this devout enthusiasm would have seemed to me actually criminal.  And I was young.  Even the suffering I had endured had neither silenced the yearning voice of my heart nor cooled the warmth of my blood.  I, who had believed that the garden of love was forever closed against me, was beloved by the most beautiful girl, who was even dearer to me than life, and with new hope, which Nenny’s faith in God’s goodness bedewed with warm spring rain, I enjoyed this happiness.

Yet conscience could not be silenced.  The warning voice of my mother, to whom I had opened my heart, sharpened the admonitions of mine; and when Wildbad brought me only relief, by no means complete recovery, I left the decision to the physician.  It was strongly adverse.  Under the most favourable circumstances years must pass ere I should be justified in binding any woman’s fate to mine.

So this beginning of a beautiful and serious love story became a swiftly passing dream.  Its course had been happy, but the end dealt my heart a blow which healed very slowly.  It opened afresh when in her parents’ house, where during my convalescence I was a frequent guest, I myself advised her to marry a young land-owner, who eagerly wooed her.  She became his wife, but only a year later entered that other world which she had regarded as her true home even while here.  Her beloved image occupies the most sacred place in the shrine of my memory.

I denied myself the pleasure of introducing her character in one of my novels, for I felt that if I should succeed in limning it faithfully the modern reader would be justified in considering her an impossible figure for our days.  She would perhaps have suited a fairy tale; and when I created Bianca in The Elixir I gave her Nenny’s form.  The gratitude which I owe her will accompany me to my life’s end, for it was she who brought to my sick-room the blue sky, sunlight, and the thousand gifts of a blooming Garden of Eden.