The Freiherr received them with a good round oath. "I was ringing for that old ass Franz!" he roared out to Werner. "Stay outside on the terrace with your Herr von Sorr until I call you by name!"
The two men were obliged to withdraw. The Freiherr rang his bell a second and a third time without any result, until at the end of a good half-hour Franz appeared, with the intelligence that Fräulein Müller was nowhere to be found. She was not in her room; Fräulein Celia said that the Fräulein had gone for a walk in the garden or park; but he had searched for her there in vain, and the gardener had helped him, and was sure she could not be either in the park or in the garden.
"Oh, my darling, darling Anna, how can I thank you?" Celia laughed and cried and kissed her friend amid tears and smiles, dancing about her room like some wild sprite.
"Come, Celia; pray be reasonable, child!" Lucie at last admonished her.
"Anything but that, dearest Anna, you must not ask that; I am half mad with delight. My dear, good old father! How unjust I have been to him! How could I keep anything from him? It was shameful! oh, if I only had told him all about it the very first day when I met Kurt!"
Lucie said nothing; but she had her own opinion as to whether the result would have been a very happy one for Celia if she had told her father of her first meeting with Kurt. The girl went on pouring her innocent delight into Lucie's ears, and repeating that she owed it all to her darling Anna.
"At last!" Celia exclaimed, and begged Lucie to make the greatest haste, lest Kurt should have to wait. Her friend complied; it would have been cruel to detain the girl longer than was necessary to hasten along the broad road, down which Celia had so often galloped upon Pluto to the appointed spot.
They soon espied the light straw hat, and an instant afterward Kurt hurried towards them.
"I have fulfilled your wish, Herr von Poseneck," Lucie said, offering her hand to the young man.
"How can I thank you sufficiently for so doing! for relinquishing your purpose of referring my request to the Freiherr von Hohenwald----"
"No, no, dearest Kurt!" exclaimed Celia. "She did not relinquish it. Yes, you may well be surprised, you unprincipled fellow, who would have persuaded me to meet you again without the knowledge of my darling, kind old father. But, oh, Kurt, we are so happy, and Anna has done it all!" And the girl, amid tears and laughter, told her amazed lover of the success of Anna's exertions in his favour.