He screamed in vain, half choking in blood and agony, "It is impossible,--with the page Von Schleunes, you mean." But nevertheless it was so,--Flamin was in prison,--Matthieu out of the country,--Le Baut already under the ground.... But demand not now the history of this murder!--Victor slowly drew out the watch of the happy Bee-father, and stared rigidly at the index of joyous hours, which, for want of winding up, had stopped some days since; something within him counselled the wild and desperate thought to hurl it against the stone floor and smash it to pieces. But three lute-breaths of the flute, with which the blind youth conjured before his benumbed soul a fairer, warmer past, dissolved his congealing heart into a wet eye, and he lifted it up overflowing, and only said, "Forgive me for it, All-gracious One,--ah, I will gladly do nothing but weep."--When the pangs of grief are too heart-rending within us, then something in us gnashes against fate, and the heart infuriate clenches itself like a fist, as it were, for resistance,--but this strength is blasphemy. O, it is more comely towards thee, All-gracious One, to let the crushed and broken heart melt away and become a tear, and to love and be silent until one dies! The familiar tones of the flute penetrated into Clotilda's thick rain-cloud of grief,--she staggered to the window,--she saw the blind one,--but she went slowly back and wrapped her heart deeper in the cold cloud,--for now she knew all; the blind one was the messenger of death, come to tell that her great friend had left the earth and the disconsolate ones behind him. "My teacher, too, is dead," she said to her companion; and when Victor sent up a request for an interview, she could only nod her head speechlessly.--Then she begged the Parson's wife to step into another chamber, because the sight of Victor, for many reasons, must be oppressive to her. Victor ascended the staircase as if to a scaffold on which fate was to pluck out his heart, namely, the good Clotilda, from whom, as well by her journey as by his purpose of resigning her, he was to-day being separated. When he opened the door and beheld the afflicted maiden leaning pale and weary against the wall; and as both with hands hanging down looked into each other's eyes red with weeping, and trembled in the sombre interval between the sight of each other and the first word, as in the fearful pause between the fire of a great gun and the arrival of the ball, and when at last Clotilda asked in a low voice, "It is all true?" and he said, "All!"-- then she slowly laid her beautiful head round to the wall again, and repeated, in one continuous utterance, but in a low, wailing tone, with the soft, muffled funeral tones of exhausted anguish, the words, "Ah! my good teacher; my never to be forgotten friend!--Ah, thou great spirit! thou fair, heavenly soul, why hast thou gone so soon after my Giulia!----O, dearest friend, be not angry, I could wish now only to