They gave no shout when some of them laid him on a litter, and others lowered another strong rope.  The cry again came up into a deathly silence:  “Raise!  Softly!” But when they caught her at the brink, then they shouted, then they wept, then they gave thanks to Heaven, then they kissed her feet, then they kissed her dress, then the dogs caressed her, licked her icy hands, and with their honest faces warmed her frozen bosom!

She broke from them all, and sank over him on his litter, with both her loving hands upon the heart that stood still.

ACT IV.

THE CLOCK-LOCK

The pleasant scene was Neuchatel; the pleasant month was April; the pleasant place was a notary’s office; the pleasant person in it was the notary:  a rosy, hearty, handsome old man, chief notary of Neuchatel, known far and wide in the canton as Maitre Voigt.  Professionally and personally, the notary was a popular citizen.  His innumerable kindnesses and his innumerable oddities had for years made him one of the recognised public characters of the pleasant Swiss town.  His long brown frock-coat and his black skull-cap, were among the institutions of the place:  and he carried a snuff-box which, in point of size, was popularly believed to be without a parallel in Europe.

There was another person in the notary’s office, not so pleasant as the notary.  This was Obenreizer.

An oddly pastoral kind of office it was, and one that would never have answered in England.  It stood in a neat back yard, fenced off from a pretty flower-garden.  Goats browsed in the doorway, and a cow was within half-a-dozen feet of keeping company with the clerk.  Maitre Voigt’s room was a bright and varnished little room, with panelled walls, like a toy-chamber.  According to the seasons of the year, roses, sunflowers, hollyhocks, peeped in at the windows.  Maitre Voigt’s bees hummed through the office all the summer, in at this window and out at that, taking it frequently in their day’s work, as if honey were to be made from Maitre Voigt’s sweet disposition.  A large musical box on the chimney-piece often trilled away at the Overture to Fra Diavolo, or a Selection from William Tell, with a chirruping liveliness that had to be stopped by force on the entrance of a client, and irrepressibly broke out again the moment his back was turned.

“Courage, courage, my good fellow!” said Maitre Voigt, patting Obenreizer on the knee, in a fatherly and comforting way.  “You will begin a new life to-morrow morning in my office here.”

Obenreizer—­dressed in mourning, and subdued in manner—­lifted his hand, with a white handkerchief in it, to the region of his heart.  “The gratitude is here,” he said.  “But the words to express it are not here.”