"
"Yes, those were glad triumphant years, take them all in all, ere the
Emperor sent me to act ambassador in Rome, and we left you the two
elder little girls and the boy to take care of. My dear little
Thekla! She had a foreboding that she might never see those children
more, yet would she have pined her heart away more surely had I left
her at home! I never was absent a week but I found her wasted with
watching for me."
"It was those weary seven years of Italy that changed thee most, my
son."
"Apart from you, mother, and knowing you now indeed to be widowed,
and with on the one hand such contradictory commands from the Emperor
as made me sorely ashamed of myself, of my nation, and of the man
whom I loved and esteemed personally the most on earth, yet bound
there by his express command, while I saw my tender wife's health
wasting in the climate day by day! Yet still, while most she gasped
for a breath of Swabian hills, she ever declared it would kill her
outright to send her from me. And thus it went on till I laid her in
the stately church of her own patroness.
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