At evening, Victor arrived at St. Luna, and ensconced himself in the arbor of the parsonage garden, where he had given Clotilda the first tears of love.--The parsonage, the hall, the observatory, the two gardens, lay around him like dilapidated knightly castles, from which all joys and inmates have long since departed!--All so autumnally still, so stationary around him,--the bees sat mute on the sill of the hive beside the executed drones,--even the moon and a little cloud stood fast beside each other,--the wax mummy stood with rigid face turned round toward the still chamber!--At last the Parson's wife came through the garden, on her way to the hall. He knew how exceedingly she must needs love him again, now that his fidelity to the jealous Flamin had come to light. O, she looked so weary and sickly, so red with weeping, and exhausted with bleeding, and prematurely old! It grieved him, that he must say first an indifferent word, in order to call her into the arbor. When she entered, he raised himself up, and bowed low, and laid himself, as if he would expire, on the dear bosom, within which was a world full of sighs and a heart full of love, and said: "O mother, I am thy son!--accept me; thy son has nothing, loves nothing more on the whole wide earth, nothing more but thee.--O dear mother, I have lost much before finding thee.--Why dost thou look on me thus?--If thou despisest me, then give me thy blessing, and let me flee.... Oh! and besides it was only for thy sake that I chose to live any longer."--She looked upon him, bending backward, with a moist eye, full of inexpressible tenderness and sorrow, and said: "Is it true, then? O God! if you were my son!--Ah, good child!--I have long loved thee as a mother.--But deceive me not, my heart is so sore!"--The son gave his oath.... and here let the curtain slowly sink on the maternal embrace, and when it has wholly covered son and mother, then let a good child look back into his own soul, and say, here dwells everything that thou canst not describe!