I stood behind these iron gratings on the following morning, and looked sadly out of the window. Strangely enough, I had not thought the evening before that these gratings could produce any unpleasant sensations in me now, and yet such was the case. They served as a grave reminder to me of what lately I had almost forgotten, that I was, after all, a prisoner. "It makes no difference," the superintendent said, when I took leave of him, and all had vied to make a family festival of the last day that I was to spend under their roof; but be that as it might, there _was_ a difference. My breakfast was not now as appetizing as it had been when I sat at it under the high trees of the quiet garden with Frau von Zehren and Paula; and even though I could go, if I chose, into the garden, which seemed to give me a friendly greeting, I must after a certain time return here again. I looked around the cell, and now first remarked what pains they had taken to make me forget where I was. There was the picture of the Sistine Madonna with the child, which I had grown to love so during my illness, and which was hung opposite my bed, just as it had hung in Paula's room. There stood upon the bureau the same two terra-cotta vases, and in each a couple of fresh roses. There was the easy-chair in which Dr. Snellius had falsely predicted that I had sat for the last time, and over the back hung a cover of crotchet-work on which I had seen Paula engaged the previous evening. There hung the same _étagère_ with the same neatly-bound books; Goethe's _Faust_, Schiller's and Lessing's works, which Paula had so often urgently recommended me to read, and into which I had as yet hardly looked. They had done all they could to make my prison as endurable, as pleasant as possible; but did not the very pains they took show that it was a prison, and that the episode of my apparent freedom was at an end. Yes, they had been kind, inexpressibly kind to me, under the friendly smiling mask of Samaritan compassion to one sick unto death--a mask that must be laid aside, as soon as a Pharisee passed that way and looked askance upon the moving sight. No, no; I was and remained a prisoner, whether my chains were decked with roses or not. Why had I not been able to break these chains? True, as I had begun, it was impossible; but why did I begin so clumsily? Why did I not keep to myself, calmly trusting in my own strength and my own craft, and in some lucky chance that must have offered sooner or later? Now, as things had happened, after I had incurred such a debt of gratitude to these people, after I had grown so attached to them, I was twice and thrice a prisoner. For the tempting pottage of friendship and love, I had bartered the first inalienable birthright of man, which is the very breath of his soul--the right of liberty. Seven years! Seven long, long years!