At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her, had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly, he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree, and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him. Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of 45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped back from the bewildering orangery.