Externally everything remained precisely as before--our lesson-hours, which she always attended as a duenna, our Sunday conversations in the kitchen-garden, now and then a meeting at Mother Lieschen's. Yet I felt more and more plainly that she trusted me and had forgiven my former follies. My hair was now parted wholly on the left side, and no longer combed behind my ears.
Whitsuntide came in the middle of June, and Whitsuntide Tuesday was her birthday, on which she attained her majority. The evening before, I had composed a long poem addressed to her, no declaration of love, merely a simple expression of gratitude for all she had done to aid my secret regeneration. I had carefully erased every exaggerated word that had flowed from my pen in the first fervor of writing, and substituted a simpler and more genuine one. I was no great poet, though I had been considered one at the college. While following the style in which church hymns are composed, I had been able to deceive myself on this point. Now that I desired to express my deepest personal feelings, I perceived that God had not granted me the power "to tell what I suffered." Yet on the whole I did not succeed badly, and it afforded me special pleasure to accost her in my lyric flight with the "Du" (thou).
Then I made a fair copy of my poem, and at midnight stole softly down-stairs and pushed it under her door, that she might find it the next morning.
I waited with many an inward tremor and quickened throbbing of the heart to learn how she would receive it, and was much relieved when, at dinner, she showed me by an unusually cordial pressure of the hand that she had not been displeased. No notice was taken in the household, save surreptitiously, of the high holiday, for which no celebration, either of music, illuminations, or fireworks, would have seemed to me brilliant enough. The old baroness had crocheted a large silver-gray shawl, which, spite of the heat, the Canoness did not lay aside all day; Uncle Joachim wore a little bouquet in the button-hole of his gray coat; my pupil Achatz, who had grown very well behaved, gave her a horse which he had sketched very carefully from nature; and Fräulein Leopoldine had placed in her room a rose-bush in full bloom. The master of the house appeared to see no reason for making any special ado over the day, though it must have been a marked one to him, since it relieved him from the duties of his guardianship.