A Voice. Somebody who is poor, and who now, for the first time, envies the rich.
He. Oh rich! rich! God forbid! rich I am not exactly. One has one's competency, thank God! One has wherewith to live. I can honestly maintain myself and a family. I sow two hundred bushels of wheat; and what do you think, Cousin Louise--but where is Cousin Louise?
A Voice. It seemed to her, no doubt, as if a cold wind came over here from Oestanvik.
At the moment when the gentlemen returned to the room, a girl came into the balcony. She was alone. The misfortunes of the evening depressed her heart, and were felt to be so much more humiliating because they were of such a mean kind. Some burning tears stole quickly and silently over her cheeks. The evening wind kissed them gently away. She looked up to heaven; never had it seemed to her so high and glorious. Her soul raised itself, mounted even higher than her glance, up to the mighty friend of human hearts; and He gave to hers a presentiment that a time would come, when, in his love, she would be reconciled to and forget all adversities of earth.
The days at Axelholm wore on merrily amid ever-varying delights. Petrea wrote long letters, in prose and in verse, to her sisters at home, and imparted to them all that occurred here. Her own misfortunes, which she even exaggerated, she described in such a comic manner that those very things which were at first distressing to her, were made a spring of hearty merriment both to herself and to her family.
She received one day a letter from her father, which contained the following words:
"Your letters, my dear child, give me and your sisters great pleasure; not merely on account of the lively things which they contain, but more especially on account of your way of bearing that which is anything but lively. Continue to do thus, my child, and you--my heart rejoices in the thought--will advance on the way to wisdom and happiness, and you will have joyfully to acknowledge the blessed truth which the history of great things, as well as of small, establishes, that there is nothing evil which may not be made conducive to good; and thus our own errors may be made steps on our way to improvement.
"Greet your sisters cordially from their and your tenderly devoted