A few words pass between them. "No,
motherling," he says, "I signed it not; I will tell you all by and
by."
And then the mid-day meal is served for the whole household, as of
old, with the salt-cellar in the middle, but with a far larger
company above it than when first we saw it. The seven young folks
preserve a decorous silence, save when Fraulein Ermentrude's
cookeries are good-naturedly complimented by her father, or when
Baron Friedmund Maximilianus breaks out with some wonderful fact
about new armour seen at Ulm. He is a handsome, fair, flaxen-haired
young man--like the old Adlersteins, say the elder people--and full
of honest gaiety and good nature, the special pride of his sisters;
and no sooner is the meal over, than, with a formal entreaty for
dismissal, all the seven, and all the dogs, move off together, to
that favourite gathering-place round the stove, where all their merry
tongues are let loose together.
To them, the Herr Vater and the Frau Grossmutter seem nearly of the
same age, and of the same generation; and verily the eighteen years
between the mother and son have dwindled into a very small difference
even in appearance, and a lesser one in feeling.
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