"I have moulded thee as Goddess of flowers," he answered.
"As _Wegewarte_?" She looked up towards him with a sad smile. He however lightly kissed her pure forehead: "As Klytia turning towards her Sun-God." She held out her hand to him, and looked up gratefully into his eyes. He pressed it as if bidding her farewell. Without that a single word passed between them, they understood one another. Klytia was free, he himself had released her from her promise.
She now went oftener than ever to the couch of the sick brother, cooled his brow with damp cloths and bound up his wounds with the delicate, apt hands of a woman.
Thus passed away peacefully the last sunny days of autumn, leaving to all the inhabitants of the gable-house the precious impression, that there was even something beautiful in the stillness of a sick-room, in which no sounds were heard but the regular breathings of the patient, the ticking of the large Nuremberg clock in the ante-chamber, and the buzzing of the gnats on the diamond panes reflecting the sun. However little the relations of the various persons seemed to have changed outwardly, Erastus nevertheless felt the magnetic deviation which had taken place in Lydia. Wearied from many visits, he sat down one afternoon with his daughter near the chapel on the other side of the bridge to enjoy the last sunny hours of the fleeting year. The Heidelberg woods lay before them tinged with yellow, and their serrated lines blue and indistinct melted away as some old poetic saw in the autumn mist causing the mountains to appear higher than usual. Near to the bench on which they sat, the blue flower bloomed by the wayside and ever turned its calix to the sun. Lydia plucked one and pondered over the world of experiences she had lived through in the short time since Felix had related to her the fable out of Ovid. Her father looked steadily at her and said: "Hast thou broken thy bonds towards Felix?"
"Felix remains a Papist," she answered evasively. "He cannot fulfil the conditions which thou hast laid upon him."
"I release him from them," said Erastus. "Are we not all Papists since we have Olevianus as our Pope, execute heretics, and that Theologians assume to themselves not only the authority of Princes, but also that of heads of houses, and fathers of families? Hardly any trace is left of the freedom which Luther and Zwingli sought to introduce."