Apollonius seems to have caught something of his brother’s unfortunate gift of reading another’s thoughts.  His brother does not ask; his face is turned away; he is seeking like a desperate man and cannot find; and yet Apollonius answers him.  “Your little Annie told me,” he said, and laughed as he thought of the child. “‘Uncle,’ said the odd little thing, ’mother is not so cross with you any more; go to her and say you won’t do it any more; then she’ll be kind again and will give you sugar.’  That’s how she put the idea into my head.  It’s wonderful how it sometimes seems as if an angel were speaking out of a child’s mouth.  Your little Annie may have been an angel to us all.”

Fritz Nettenmair laughed so boisterously at the child that Apollonius’ laughter caught fire again from his.  But Fritz knew that it was a devil that had spoken out of the child’s mouth.  Yet he laughed—­so hard that it did not strike Apollonius how forced and disconnected his reply was.  “Well then, tomorrow, as far as I’m concerned, or even this afternoon; now I can’t possibly spare the time.  Now I’ll go down with you to St. George’s.  I have a necessary errand to do tomorrow!  Oh, the confounded child!”

Apollonius had no suspicion how seriously the laughing “confounded” was meant.  He said, still laughing at the child himself, “Good.  We’ll ask tomorrow then.  And then everything will be different.  I am looking forward to it as gladly as the child, and you are too, I know, Fritz.  We’ll make it a very different life from what we have been leading.”  Kindhearted Apollonius rejoiced so heartily at his brother’s joy!  He continued to do so even after he was up again on his swinging seat, flying round the church roof.

Just as restlessly hovered about his brother’s fear the sinister something that hung above him and threatened to engulf him; still more industriously did his heart hammer away at the crumbling plans to hinder the fall:  but the ship of his thoughts did not hang between heaven and earth, held by the light of heaven.  It pitched deeper and ever deeper between earth and hell, and hell branded him ever darker with its fire.

Toward evening Christiane was suddenly aroused from her dreaming by two men’s voices.  She was sitting in the grass not far from the closed door of the shed.  Fritz and his brother had just entered the shed from the street at the back.  She heard him teasing his brother about Anne Wohlig.  Anne was the best match in the whole town—­and Apollonius was a rascal who knew the world and the species that wore long hair and aprons.  Anne was already sewing away at her outfit, and her cousins were carrying the news of her approaching marriage to Apollonius from house to house.  Christiane heard her husband ask when the wedding was to be.  She had been about to move away; now she forgot to go, she forgot to breathe.  And then she almost gave a jubilant shout:  Apollonius had said that he was not going to marry at all, either Anne or any one else.