"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die." His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by frost. He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy, then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope. "Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not, my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no more the old breast, full as it may be." Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see, because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.-- He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and from him thou must conceal it." Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely, they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?" "Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father. "But in case--?"