There you will find out just how much you can do, and after that we will decide what is best for our young artist." Fani sprang to his feet and stood speechless before his kind benefactress.

When he tried to speak, tears came instead of the words he meant to utter.
Mrs.Stanhope saw his emotion with far more satisfaction than if he had overwhelmed her with thanks.
"Now," she said to herself, "he is certainly in earnest." "Meanwhile," she continued aloud, "we shall often be with you, Elsli and I, sometimes at home, or wherever it is best for us to spend the winters.

In summer we shall be all together here.

You are my own children now; and I shall do for you just as I should have done for my Philo and Nora if they had stayed with me." Tears stood in Mrs.Stanhope's eyes, but she smiled too, as she held out her arms to the children, and drew them, radiant with joy and gratitude, into a mother's embrace.
There were great rejoicings among their friends in Buchberg over the news that Mrs.Stanhope had adopted the two children, and that Fani was to become an art-student.

Oscar and Fred, and still more the triumphant Emma, could already see with prophetic eyes the announcement of the great exhibition to be held in the neighboring city, of the wonderful landscapes of that "celebrated painter, Fani von Buchberg!" Heiri's family grew better off every year with the help that came from the absent children and their new mother, and Elsli was happy in the thought that her father's hardest days were over, and that her own good-fortune had brought good to him also.
Oscar and the Fink boys kept up an uninterrupted correspondence.