--But here let the gentler soul, which the thunderbolts of fate too sorely agitate, turn its eye away from the great yellow flash which suddenly darts through the still Eden! * * * * * "Scoundrel!" cried Flamin, rushing out with sparkling looks, with snow-white cheeks, with locks hanging down like a mane, with two pocket-pistols in his hands,--"there take, take; blood I want," and thrust the deadly weapon towards him; Victor forced Clotilda aside, saying, "Innocent one! do not aggravate thy sorrows!"--Flamin cried in a new kindling of fury, "Blood!--Faithless one, take, fire!"--Matthieu fell upon his right arm, but the left, trembling, forced the weapon upon Victor.--Victor snatched it towards him, because the muzzle was swaying about Clotilda.--"Thou art in truth my brother," cried the tortured girl, whose deathly agony alone kept her by its rack from the death of a swoon.--Flamin with both arms flung all from him and said with a horribly low and long-drawn voice in his raving exhaustion, "Blood!--Death!"--Clotilda sank to the ground. Victor looked at her and said, turning to him, "Only fire, here is my life!"--Flamin cried aloud, "Thou first!"--Victor shot, lifting his arm high up, so as to shoot into the air, and the splintered top of a branch was brought down by his ball.--Clotilda came to.--Emanuel flew to the spot,--threw himself on his pupil's heart,--from his breast for the first time in years rent with passion the sickly blood gushed out. Flamin proudly hurled away his pistol and said to Matthieu, "Come!--it isn't worth the trouble," and went off with him. When Clotilda saw Emanuel's blood on her lover's clothes, she supposed him to have been hit, and laid her handkerchief on the blood and said, "Ah, you have not deserved this of me!"--Emanuel breathed again through his blood, no one could speak any more, no one could think, every one feared to give consolation, the mortally crushed hearts parted with suppressed woe; only Victor, whom the horrible word "scoundrel" at every recollection of it pierced through like a dagger, said to the sister: "I love him no more, but he is unhappier than we; ah! he has lost all and kept nothing but a devil." Namely, Matthieu. It was he who had to-day imitated the voice of Emanuel, which had seemed to speak with Julius, and whose voice Dahore had taken for his father's, and afterward the voice of the nightingale, which Victor had followed, in order to convince the Regency Counsellor through his own ears and eyes of Victor's love for Clotilda.