brighter sun of mutual understanding and happiness might shine forth for them both. He knew Jenny, and was well aware that she was of an energetic, decided character, not easily led, and hard to be curbed; but yet he excused himself for the way he had acted on the ground of necessity, and, thinking that Jenny, like every woman, did not act from strictly logical reasons, but let herself be carried away by the overpowering impulse of the moment, he indulged, as people of weak character will do, in fantastic dreams, and pursued them trustingly; and whenever he descended to the cold world of reality he was sure to find some rays of hope to bring warmth and life into it. As long as he remained at home, he practised the old hypocrisy before his mother, and thought that it was impossible for him to act otherwise.
The baroness was as yet completely in the dark about the love-affair of her son with her former companion, and did not trouble her head in the least with regard to Jenny’s having left her service, Jenny having told her, as an excuse for taking this step, that she was going to a much more lucrative situation.
For a long time the shrewd old baroness had remarked that a change, and not a trifling one either, had come over her son; but she thought the cause of it was to be traced back to the accident in the avenue, and to the illness that followed it. She had more than once consulted the castle doctor secretly on this subject, and she had no reason to distrust his opinion. He had satisfied her with the explanation that, according to the inscrutable laws of nature, a new epoch must have been inaugurated in the bodily and mental life of the baron by that accident; but that the change did not in the least impair his
