“Gone, gone!  Thrown away, lost!  The best on earth!” He laid his hands on the tree-stem and pressed his head against it till it hurt him.  He did not know how to contain himself for misery and self-reproach.  He felt like a man who has been drunk and has reduced his own house to ashes in his intoxication.  How all this could have come to pass he now no longer knew.  After his nocturnal ride he had caused Nilus the treasurer to be waked, and had charged him to liberate Hiram secretly.  But it was the sight of his stricken father that first brought him completely to his sober senses.  By his bed-side, death in its terrible reality had stared him in the face, and he had felt that he could not bear to see that beloved parent die till he had made his peace with Paula, won her forgiveness, brought her whom his father loved so well into his presence, and besought his blessing on her and on himself.

Twice he had hastened from the chamber of suffering to her room, to entreat her to hear him, but in vain; and now, how terrible had their parting been!  She was hard, implacable, cruel; and as he recalled her person and individuality as they had struck him before their quarrel, he was forced to confess that there was something in her present behavior which was not natural to her.  This inhuman severity in the beautiful woman whose affection had once been his, and who, but now, had flung his flowers into the water, had not come from her heart; it was deliberately planned to make him feel her anger.  What had withheld her, under such great provocation, from betraying that she had detected him in the theft of the emerald?  All was not yet lost; and he breathed more freely as he went back to the house where duty, and his anxiety for his father, required his presence.  There were his flowers, floating on the stream.

“Hatred cast them there,” thought he, “but before they reach the sea many blossoms will have opened which were mere hard buds when she flung them away.  She can never love any man but me, I feel it, I know it.  The first time we looked into each other’s eyes the fate of our hearts was sealed.  What she hates in me is my mad crime; what first set her against me was her righteous anger at my suit for Katharina.  But that sin was but a dream in my life, which can never recur; and as for Katharina—­I have sinned against her once, but I will not continue to sin through a whole, long lifetime.  I have been permitted to trifle with love unpunished so often, that at last I have learnt to under-estimate its power.  I could laugh as I sacrificed mine to my mother’s wishes; but that, and that alone, has given rise to all these horrors.  But no, all is not yet lost!  Paula will listen to me; and when she sees what my inmost feelings are—­when I have confessed all to her, good and evil alike—­when she knows that my heart did but wander, and has returned to her who has taught me that love is no jest, but solemn earnest, swaying all mankind, she will come round—­everything will come right.”