They had scarcely landed at the end of the lake when they saw in the distance the three figures they were looking for, strolling slowly along the road that circled the shore. When within hailing distance, the prearranged farce of a chance meeting and recognition was played with the utmost seriousness, and it was impossible to detect, from the godmother's manner, whether she had accepted a _rôle_ in the comedy, or whether she innocently believed that the two gentlemen who lived opposite the sisters in the city had merely seized this opportunity to exchange a word or two with their lovely neighbors for the first time. The girls bore themselves in accordance with their respective characters--the elder quiet and sparing of words, the younger gay and coquettish even to audacity. They were dressed charmingly, and indeed almost elegantly; but Fanny wore dark ribbons, while Nanny's little hat was adorned with a red rose and trimmings of the same color. The battle-painter had warned the good Kohle at the dinner-table against the godmother, as a pious creature, enthusiastic about art and notorious for enticing into her net innocent young painters of a serious turn of mind. But she was, in fact, a pleasant little soul enough, far on in the thirties. She had lost her husband, a well-to-do confectioner, shortly after their marriage, and was fond of protesting, with many sighs, that she never, never could forget him. A Gothic temple, made of sugar and adorned with numerous figures of saints, which he had made for their marriage, as a sort of triumph of his art, still stood in a state of good preservation under a glass case upon her sideboard. Nevertheless rumor said of her that she had not always harshly repulsed the numerous offers she had received as a widow, though she had been too wise to give the slightest cause for public gossip. Certain ecclesiastical gentlemen, who were in the habit of going in and out of her house, gave her the best certificate of character; and though she did not close her door to young artists, she took care to see that they were proper, respectable people, who painted church pictures with long robes, and did not wear their shirt-collars after the fashion of too erratic genius; and that they held aloof from all pagan theories of art. To this godly way of life she owed it that her own godmother, the glove-maker's wife, had trusted her with "the children" for a day, although some malicious people pretended to think that to go gadding into the country was not exactly the thing for well-preserved widows.