It was an experience utterly new to her to be thus agitated by a combination of truth and fiction. The Venner threw the ballad into the fire, and himself into Lenette's arms, and cried-- "Oh! you sympathising, noble, holy creature!" I cannot paint the amazement with which, completely unprepared for and incomprehensive of this transition from crying to kissing, she shoved him away. This made little impression on him; he was on his high horse and said he must have some souvenir of this "sacred entrancing moment"--only a little lock of her hair. Her humble station, his high-flown language, and the fact that she was perfectly unable to form the slightest idea what use her hair would be to him, even supposing she gave enough to stuff a pillow--all this put into her head the foolish idea that he wanted it to perform some magical rite with, such as putting her under a love spell, or something of the sort. He might have stabbed himself there and then before her, hewn himself in pieces, impaled himself alive, she wouldn't have interfered; she might indeed have shed her _blood_ to save him, but not a single _hair_ of her head. He had still one resource _in petto_--he had really never met with such a case as this before; he lifted up his hand and vowed that he would get Herr von Blaise to recognise her husband as his nephew, and pay over his inheritance--and that with the greatest ease, because he would threaten to jilt his niece unless he did it--if she would just take the scissors and cut off a _little_ hair memorial, no bigger even than the fourth part of a moustache. She knew nothing about the business of the inheritance, and he was consequently obliged, to the great detriment of his enthusiastic state, to give a prosaic, detailed account of the _species facti_ of the whole of that law suit. By great good fortune he had still in his pocket the number of the 'Gazette' in which the inheritance chamber's inquiry as to the advocate's existence appeared in print, and he was able to put it into her hands. And now this plundered wife began to cry bitterly, not for the loss of the money, but because her husband had told her nothing about it all this time, and still more because she couldn't quite make out what her own name really was, or whether she was married to a Siebenkæs or to a Leibgeber. Her tears flowed faster and faster, and in her passion of grief she would have let the deceiver before her have all the pretty hair on her head, had not an accidental circumstance burst the whole chain of events, just as he was kneeling and imploring her for one little lock.