Soon, Heidi becomes terribly homesick for the Alm, and grows alarmingly pale and thin. However, the Sesemanns' strict housekeeper, Fräulein Rottenmeier, views the household disruptions as wanton misbehaviour, and places the free-spirited Heidi under more and more restraint, forbidding her to talk of the Alps or to cry for home. Klara is charmed by Heidi's simple friendliness and her descriptions of life on the Alm, and delights in all the funny mishaps brought about by Heidi's naïvety and lack of experience with city life. Three years later, Dete returns to take Heidi to Frankfurt to be a hired lady's companion to a wealthy girl named Klara Sesemann, who is unable to walk and regarded as an invalid. However, the grandfather refuses to allow Heidi to attend school, and quarrels with the local pastor and schoolmaster, who try to encourage him to do so, and Heidi is illiterate as a result. With each season that passes, the mountaintop inhabitants, especially Peter and the grandmother, grow more attached to Heidi, and she to them. Heidi enthusiastically befriends her new neighbours, young Peter the goatherd, his mother Brigitte, and his blind maternal grandmother. He briefly resents Heidi's arrival, but the girl's evident intelligence and cheerful yet unaffected demeanour soon earn his genuine, if reserved, love. He has been at odds with the villagers and embittered against God for years and lives in seclusion on the Alm, which has earned him the nickname 'The Alm-Uncle'. Shortly after the grandmother's death, Dete is offered a good job as a maid in the big city, and takes 5-year-old Heidi to her paternal grandfather's house, up the mountain from Dörfli. Heidi is initially raised by her maternal grandmother and Dete in Maienfeld. Soon after Tobias is killed in a work accident and Adelheid dies of shock.

They have a daughter, named Adelheid but affectionately nicknamed Heidi. Adelheid and Tobias marry and work as carpenters. When they grow, Dete takes a job in the town of Maienfeld, in the Grisons, as a hotel maid. Two village girls, Dete and Adelheid, befriend Tobias. The man becomes known as The Alm-Uncle, as he lives in seclusion on the mountain Alm. Upon his return with a son, Tobias, the villagers ostracize him and create rumors surrounding his life in Naples. The older wasted the family fortune on drinking and gambling, while the younger ran away to serve in the Italian Army in Naples. In the town of Dörfli ('small village' in Swiss German), lived two brothers. Aunt Dete hurrying away after leaving Heidi with her grandfather

Johanna spyri novel