The Captain too had been suborned to draw Eduard’s attention to Ottilie, but Eduard had been obstinately mindful of his youthful love for Charlotte, and he had looked neither to right nor left, but was thinking only that he might now be going to find it possible to seize at last the possession he wanted so much but which events seemed to have put beyond his reach for ever.

The couple were about to go down to the mansion across the new park when a servant came clambering up towards them laughing, and called out from below: ‘Come along quick, sir! Come along quick, madam! Herr Mittler has just come bursting in. He has roused us all up and told us to go and look for you and ask you if you need him. “Ask if they need me, d’you hear!” was his words. “And make haste, make haste!”’

‘The strange fellow!’ Eduard exclaimed. ‘Has he not arrived at just the right moment, Charlotte?’ Turning to the servant, he said: ‘Go back quickly! Tell him we do need him, very much! Ask him to dismount, take care of his horse, invite him in and offer him some breakfast. We are just coming.

‘Let us take the shortest way back,’ he said to his wife, and went off down the path through the churchyard which he usually avoided. He was very surprised when he discovered that here too Charlotte had provided for the demands of sensibility. With every consideration for the ancient monuments she had managed to level and arrange everything in such a way as to create a pleasant place which was nice to look at and which set the imagination working.

The oldest memorial of all had been put in a place of suitable honour. In the order of their antiquity the gravestones were erected against the wall, inserted into it, or lodged in some other way. The base of the church itself was ornamented and augmented by this arrangement. Eduard felt very moved when, entering through the little gateway, he saw the place. He pressed Charlotte’s hand and tears came into his eyes.

But they went out of them the next instant when the eccentric guest appeared. Incapable of sitting quietly in the mansion he had ridden at full gallop through the village up to the churchyard gate, where he drew rein and shouted out: ‘You’re not pulling my leg, eh? If you really do need me I’ll stay until lunchtime. But don’t detain me. I’ve a lot still to do today.’

‘Since you’ve taken the trouble to come so far,’ Eduard called up to him, ‘you might as well ride all the way in. We meet in a solemn place. See how Charlotte has beautified this funeral-ground.’

‘Into that place,’ replied the mounted man, ‘I enter neither on horse, nor by carriage, nor on foot. The people in there are at peace, with them I have no business. You’ll never find me joining them until they drag me in feet first. So you’re serious, then?’

‘Yes,’ Charlotte cried, ‘quite serious! It is the first time we newly-weds have found ourselves in a difficulty we don’t know how to get out of.’

‘You don’t look as if you are in any difficulty,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll believe you. If you’re leading me on I’ll leave you in the lurch another time. Follow me back. Make haste! My horse could do with a rest.’

The three were soon back home and in the dining-room. They ate and Mittler said what he had done and what he was going to do that day. This singular gentleman was in earlier years a minister of religion. Unflagging in his office, he had distinguished himself by his capacity for settling and silencing all disputes, domestic and communal, first between individual people, then between landowners, and then between whole parishes. There were no divorces and the local judiciary was not pestered by a single suit or contention during the whole period of his incumbency. He recognized early on how essential a knowledge of law was to him, he threw himself into a study of this science, and he soon felt a match for the best lawyers. The sphere of his activities expanded wondrously and he was on the point of being called to the Residenz so that he might complete from on high what he had begun among the lowly when he won a big prize in a lottery. He bought a modest estate, farmed it out and made it into the central point of his life, with the firm intention, or rather according to his fixed habit and inclination, never to enter any house where there was not a dispute to settle or difficulties to put right.