"Look!" said she, "these are our children; give them each a kiss, they will not wake."
Franzl was to remain in the sitting room, while Annele went to the kitchen, to get ready something for her to eat. Franzl nodded--"She is very different from what she used to be." The good old woman could not, however, stay long in the parlour, and went to join Annele in the kitchen, who said: "Oh, what a luxury to be able to light a good fire!"
Franzl looked at her in surprise. She could not understand being so thankful for all the common things of life, which are too often accepted by us as mere matters of course.
"What do you say to my white hair?" asked Annele.
"I wish I could give you mine, for it is still quite black; and it will never turn grey, for my mother often told me I had a good head of hair when I was born."
Annele smiled, and said it had been so ordained; and that it was well she should bear about with her a lasting token that she had been in the jaws of death, and must now be doubly good in the world. "You forgive me, too, don't you, Franzl? I assure you I thought of you at the hour when death seemed very near."
It was indeed wonderful to see the transformation that had taken place in Annele. When she heard the church bells ringing for the first time, she took her little girl in her arms, and, making her clasp her hands, she exclaimed, "Oh, my child, I little thought we should ever hear these sounds again!" And when Franzl brought in the first pailful of water, she cried, "Oh, how pure and refreshing spring water is! I thank our Heavenly Father who gives it to us!"
While the men had almost entirely recovered the awful hours when they had been momentarily exposed to destruction, Annele seemed to herself to have risen from the dead; she was now mild and gentle, and every hasty word went to her heart, so that Franzl often lamented to Pilgrim, and said, "I fear Annele will not live long, there is something so holy and unearthly in her look."
The escape of the inhabitants of the house on the Morgenhalde, was the cause of an event passing almost unperceived, that would otherwise have been a source of much talk and discussion.
On the second day after Lenz's rescue, the body of a man was found in a wooded ravine near Knuslingen, buried under the snow frozen. It was that of Pröbler. No one regretted his fate so much as Lenz, for he could not help thinking that it was his voice he had heard calling him, the night he left him; and he suspected something more in the death of the miserable old man than other people imagined, but he kept these thoughts to himself.