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Andreas truly was old Andreas now. As men’s lives go, his age was not great; but sorrow had made him, as it had made many another man, far older than the mere number of years which he had lived. No, great store of strength had been his at the beginning, and the heart-break that he had suffered that day of his landing in the New World, when faith and love and hope all died together at a single blow, was less a sentimental figure than a physical reality. A like pang, yet not so keen, had wrenched him when he first came to know of Christine’s sharp trial of poverty, and another seized him in the night-time following that sad day when she passed away from earth. And now of late, without any cause at all, these pangs had come again. Andreas was glad that they had come always when he was alone; for the pain was too searching to be wholly hidden, and his strong desire was that Roschen should be spared all knowledge of his suffering. In his own mind he perceived quite clearly what before long must come to pass. And it was a good happening, he thought, that in Gottlieb Brekel and Aunt Hedwig, and the excellent Herr Sohnstein, who, being a lawyer, could care well for the little store in the bank and for the little house that Andreas now owned, Roschen had such stanch and worthy friends. The only signs of these thoughts which Roschen perceived was that her father grew much keener in the matter of selling his birds at high prices; and that she was somewhat seriously reproved when, in her housekeeping or in her occasional expeditions to the fine shops in Grand Street, she ventured upon any small extravagance. But Roschen would laugh when thus reproved, and would declare that her father, who long had been a glutton, was become a miser already in his old age; whereat Andreas also would laugh, yet not quite so heartily as Roschen liked to hear him laugh when she cracked her little jokes upon him, and would say that sometimes a miser was not thought by his heirs so bad a fellow when they found what a snug little fortune he had left behind him all safe in the bank.

It was because of these thoughts, which he kept hidden from her, that Andreas began to take a much more active interest in what Roschen had to say from time to time about certain young men of her acquaintance. The young man of whom she spoke most frequently, and with a frank friendliness, was the handsome young assistant baker at the Cafe Nuernberger; a very capable young fellow, Hans Kuhn by name, who of late had brought that excellent bakery into great vogue because of the almost miraculously good lebkuchen which he baked there. But Andreas was not at all alarmed by this open friendship; for Hans and the stout Minna Brekel were to be married presently, and Roschen’s feeling obviously was no more than hearty good-will towards the lover of her dear sister-friend. Fine chatterings she and Minna had, as Andreas inferred from her occasional brief reports of them, about the prodigious matrimonial event that was so near at hand. As Andreas also inferred, these chatterings put various notions of an exciting and somewhat disturbing sort into Roschen’s little head. If one young girl might get married, so might another, no doubt she thought; and it is conceivable that from this mental statement of a rational abstract possibility her thoughts may have passed on to consideration of the concrete possibilities involved in her own relations with the good-looking Gustav Strauss, son of the rich bird-dealer, or with the good-looking young shoemaker, Ludwig Bauer, who lived next door but one.

It is certain that when Roschen had arrived at the dignity of eighteen years, and her hitherto slim figure had taken on quite a plump, pleasing womanly roundness, the business visits of the young Herr Strauss to the little bird shop on the East Side became, as it struck Andreas, rather curiously frequent. And about this time, also, their neighbor Ludwig developed a very extraordinary interest in the business of raising canary-birds. It was a business that he long had thought of engaging in, he explained; and he truly did exhibit an aptitude in comprehending and in practising its mysteries that greatly exalted him in the little bird-dealer’s esteem. The birds all seemed to recognize a friend in him; and even those which were but partially tamed, and were gentle only with Andreas himself, would perch willingly upon his hand. With Andreas it long had been a maxim that canary-birds were rare judges of human character, and the testimonial thus given to Lud-wig’s worth counted with him for a great deal–as did also the quite converse opinion of the birds in regard to the young Herr Strauss: from whom, notwithstanding his training in the care of their kind, they always flew away, and whose mere presence in the shop sufficed to make every bird ruffle himself and to chirp angrily in his cage. Yet Herr Strauss was most agreeable in his manners, and was a very personable young man. As for his riches, they spoke for themselves in his fine attire and in his fine gold watch and chain; and he also spoke for them, making frequent allusions to his comfortable present position in the world as his father’s partner, and to his still more comfortable prospective position as his father’s sole heir.