This painful observation Victor made still sooner than myself.--But to the story! The past portion of it sent a thousand thorns through his heart. We no longer recognize now our once joyous Sebastian,--he has lost four beings, as if to pay off therewith the four days of Whitsuntide: Emanuel has vanished, Flamin has become an enemy, his Lordship a stranger, and Clotilda--a stranger. For he said to himself: "Now, when she is removed so far above me, I will not cost the sufferer, from whom I have already taken so much, absolutely everything, absolutely her father's love and her position,--I will not insist upon the love which, in her ignorance of my connections, she has bestowed upon me.--No, I will cheerfully tear away my soul from the most precious one amidst a thousand wounds of my breast, and then lay myself down and bleed to death." _Now_ this determination was easy for him; for after the death of a friend we love to take a new load of misery on our breast; _that_ shall crush it, for we _will_ die. Yet destiny had still left two loved ones in his arms; his Julius and his mother. In the former he loves so many sweet associations; even this was one, namely, that one always loves him with whom one has been confounded; and he would fain fulfil the place of father with him as his Lordship had done with _him_, in order not so much to requite as to emulate that noble man. And still more ardently did his soul embrace the excellent wife of the Pastor, to whom his heart had already hitherto beat responsive with the soft warmth of a son. Ah, how would it have comforted in its longing his childlike breast, from which one hitherto his father was thrust away, to be clasped to a maternal heart, and to hear from a mother the words, "Good son, why comest thou to me so unhappy and so late?" But he dared not, because in that case he would have broken the oath to leave Flamin's extraction under the cover of mystery.