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From the book: '...He smiled, but not with his usual sarcasm - this time it shone like sunshine over his features as he took the offered hand and gently lifted Gabrielen's head with his left hand to kiss her forehead. This was nothing unusual. He always did it when she brought him the morning greeting at breakfast, and she had accepted it as casually as the guardian coolly and seriously exercised his paternal right. Today, for the first time, the young girl involuntarily recoiled, and Raven felt the hand he held in his tremble slightly. He suddenly straightened up without having touched her forehead with his lips and let go of her hand. 'You are right,' he said, strained. 'The sound of the Nix spring has something ghostly about it - let’s go!' They turned to leave. Behind them, the spring gushed and trickled, tirelessly throwing its white water veils upward. The looming destruction had now been averted; the plea of those brown eyes and the tear within them had saved him, and the serious, cold man, who had long surpassed the height of life, perhaps felt at that moment that he too was not immune to the 'Nix enchantment...' Elisabeth Bürstenbinder (1838-1918) was a German writer. She wrote under the pseudonym E. Werner.