But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls, exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances, magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss.... "St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have dissuaded him from the _noble masque_. Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air, probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court. More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and, in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights, and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.