He stepped hastily into the beaming day, to overtake the giver, whose morning-offering he unhappily, for fear of destroying it, could no more press to his heart than he could herself. O how it saddened him, when he stood in the open air before the Moravian churchyard of the heavenly night which had _gone home_, before the reposing garden, and when he looked upon the bald, close-shaven, trodden-down dancing-floor, and on the silent nightingale's-bush, and on the hills where the children were tending sheep, disrobed of yesterday's finery! Then the forgotten dream again appeared and said: Weep once more, for the rose-feast of thy life concludes to-day, and the last of the _four_ rivers of Paradise in a few hours will utterly dry up!--"O ye fair days," said Victor, "ye deserve that I should leave you with a tenderness that knows no measure and with unnumbered tears!"--He fled from the too harsh daylight into the cell of crape, that it might recolor the brilliant foreground of the day into a dim back-ground, overspread with the moonshine of yesterday; and under this pall of the pale dead night he proposed to himself to indulge his heart, so soon to be impoverished, with its last joy, namely, its yearning, in utter overmeasure. He stepped out of the tent, but the nocturnal moonshine faded not from the lawn; he looked up into the blue heaven, which touches us with _one_ long flame, but the veiled stars of the wintry night sent little outwelling rays to the eclipsed soul; he said to himself, indeed, "The ice-mountain on which hitherto my reason has delivered half sermons-on-the-mount, has shrunk up under the glow of joy to a mole-hill," but he added, "To-day I care for nothing." He came to Emanuel with wet eyes. The latter told him that the first link of yesterday's chain of flowers, namely the Briton with his people, had already loosed itself in the night. But the longer he looked on Emanuel and thought of the morrow,--for to-morrow before day he too would softly close the garden gate of this Paradise behind, and this afternoon he is to take leave of the Abbess and this evening of his beloved, in order not to hinder her in the reading out of the well-known angel's-epistle,--so much the more painful was the straining of his eyes, and he preferred to go out, with a heart bleeding itself full, into the open air, and led the blind one with him, who suspected nothing, saw nothing, and before whom, besides, one loved to lay bare his innermost heart as before a child.