Julie's plan was to carry her husband off to Italy, there to look for some spot on which to settle down and found their home. When they had made up their minds whether Florence, or Rome, or Venice was to be their resting-place, they were to return and get little Frances, who would have been rather out of place in this wintry wedding-journey of her parents.
Meanwhile Julie had taken advantage of a favorable opportunity to enter into a low conversation with old Schoepf in regard to the future of his grandchild. In spite of the power she exerted over all with whom she came in contact, she did not find it easy to break down the old man's obstinacy. Finding that all her assertions of how sincere the baron's remorse was were of as little avail as her efforts to convince him of the material benefit which the reconciliation would be to his grandchild's future, she finally summoned cunning to her aid, and represented that in granting this request he would be conferring a personal favor upon her, a sort of wedding-present, which such an old friend of her husband surely could not refuse her. The chivalrous old man could resist no longer, and so, with a solemn shake of the hand, Julie secured all that the baron could demand with any kind of justice, although a complete reconciliation still seemed quite unattainable for the present.
Jansen had been listening to this conversation, which had been carried on in a low tone; and now he, in his turn, thanked the old man by a pressure of the hand. All this time he had scarcely uttered a word. His heart was full of a bliss too deep for words; the cheerful noise of the good people about him sounded in his ears as if it came from a great distance; his eyes rested on the flowers before his plate, and did not even venture to gaze at the noble woman who was really his own at last; and it was only with difficulty that he could force himself even to smile when the others burst into roars of laughter over some joke of the lieutenant's, or some enthusiastic expression of Angelica's.
As they sat thus, there suddenly burst forth from Julie's piano, at which Elfinger was seated, the first bars of the wedding-march in the "Midsummer Night's Dream." On the instant all voices were hushed, and they stood listening to the fairy strains that made them forget, for the moment, that the winter night with its thousand glittering stars looked in upon them, and suffered no other elfin tricks than those which possibly lurked concealed in the foam of the champagne glasses.