“Yes, ’Tista, I will come.”

He took down his old velvet cap from its peg behind the door, and stooping over the little glass dish in which he had placed the spray of my blossoms the preceding day, lifted me carefully out of the water, wiped the dripping stem, and fastened me in his coat again.  I believe he did this to show the boy a pleasure.

But a little while after this, and Herr Ritter sat again in the old wooden chair by the widow’s couch.  Early that morning she had written to her sister a long letter, which she now put into the old German’s hands, begging him to carry it for her to the Casa d’Oro, and bring her in return whatever message or note Carlotta Nero should give him.  “For,” said the poor woman, with anxious eyes, and pallid lips that quivered under the burden of the words they uttered, “I do not know for how long my sister may be staying here, and perhaps I shall never meet her again.  And since I am not able to go myself into the town today, and I fear to miss her, I thought, dear friend, you would not mind taking this for me; and, perhaps, if my sister should ask you anything, saying you know me, and—­and—­’Tista?”

She faltered a little there, and the old man took her hand in his with the tender, pitying gesture we use to little children.

“Be at ease, dear ’Lora,” he murmured, “I will bring you good news.  But the hour is early yet, and if I start so soon, your sister may not be able to receive me.  So I’ll go back and take my cup of coffee at home before I set out.”

He was rising, but she laid her hand on his arm gently.

“Dear friend, why should you leave us?  ’Tista is getting my breakfast ready now, let him get yours also.”

So Herr Ritter stayed, and the three had their morning meal together.  There was a little loaf of coarse black bread, a tin jug filled with coffee, and some milk in a broken mug.  Only that, and yet they enjoyed it, for they finished all the loaf, and they drank all the coffee and the milk, and seemed wonderfully better for their frugal symposium when ’Tista rose to clear the table.  Only black bread and coffee; and yet that sorry repast was dignified with such discourse as those who sit at the tables of Dives are not often privileged to hear.

For Herr Ritter was a scholar and a philosopher.  He had studied from his youth the strange and growing discoveries of geology, astronomy, and chemistry; he had wrested from the bosom of Nature her most subtle secrets, and the earth and the heavens were written in a language which he understood and loved to read.  I learned that he had been a student in earlier days at a German university, and had there first begun to think.  From the time he was twenty, until this very hour in which he sat by the side of ’Lora Delcor, he had been thinking; and now that he had become an ancient man, with a beard of snow, and a face full of the deep furrows of a solitary old age, he was thinking still.  He had given up the world in order to think, and yet, he told us, he was as far from the truth as ever, and was content to know nothing, and to be as a little child in the presence of Life and of God.