When he went the next morning,--first to St. Luna,--and passed along before the convent of Mary, where once the adopted daughter of the Italian Tostato would have offered a sixth finger, Marie was just coming out of a limb-shop,[178] where she had bought two wax hearts. Victor drew out from her by long and ingenious questioning that she was going to hang one of them, which represented hers, on the holy Mary, because hers no longer pained her so much nor was so much oppressed as it had been the week before.--As to the second, she would not for a long time let anything out; at last she confessed: it was Victor's own, which she was going to offer to the Holy Mother of God, because she thought it must pain him also right sorely, as he looked so pale and sighed so often.----"Give it to me, love," he said, too deeply moved, "_I will offer my heart myself_." "Ay," he repeated out under the still heaven, "the heart behind the wall of the breast will I offer,--that, too, is of wax,--and to mother Earth will I give it, that it may heal,--heal." ... Let him weep freely, my friends, now that he beholds smiling the still, pale earth, even up to its hazy mountains.--For softness of sensibility loves to ally itself with petrifying processes and the art[179] of Passau against the calamities of fate. Let him weep freely, as he looks upon this flowerless earth, spinning itself, as it were, into the silk of the fugitive summer, and feels as if he must fall down and kiss the cold meadow as a mother, and say, "Bloom again sooner than I; thou hast given me enough of joys and flowers!"--The silent dissolution of nature, on whose corpse the full-blooming daisy stood as if it were a death-garland, softly unnerved his powers by this loosening friction,--he was exhausted and stilled,--nature reposed around him and he in it,--the exhaustion overflowed almost into a sweet, tickling faintness,--the tear-gland swelled and pressed no more before it ran over; but its water trickled down like dew out of flowers, easily and without stopping, as the blood flowed through his breast. He saw now St. Luna lying before him, but, as it were, withdrawn from him in a moonlight. He passed not through, in order not to see the wax statue, whose funeral sermon he had delivered, and for which he also possessed a heart of wax; but he went round along the outskirts. "Grow ever broader and more bustling, fair spot: never may an enemy beleaguer thee around!" He said no more. For as he passed by the church-yard he thought, "Have not all these, then, also taken leave of the place; and am I the only one who does it?"--The mere backward glance at the slated roof of the parsonage kindled one more lightning flash of pain at the thought of a _mother's_ tears for his death; but he soon whispered to himself the consolation, that the maternal heart of the parson's wife, never weaned from Flamin, would cure its sorrow for the victim by its joy over the rescued favorite.