They wandered in the tender intoxication slowly into Le Baut's garden, and the stream of rapture grew deeper and deeper; but suddenly ice-cold waves, as from the river Styx, terrified the softly warmed Victor, when he came to the mournful bower, where, exactly a year ago to-day, on the 21st of October,--to-day then is Clotilda's birth-day,--he had torn her image out of his distracted heart, and where he now arrived again, perhaps again to tear it out from the old scars. For the lowering of his rank had made him a little--prouder, and his love for Clotilda more shy. To tell the truth, he could not himself fully believe that his inferior extraction had been unknown to her; he rather inferred the opposite, from the interest which his Lordship had let her take in his letters, and all secrets,--from her struggle in the beginning against her germinating love, and from the slight haughtiness towards him on the first day,--from her praise of misalliances,--from her favoring of Giulia's love for Julius, whom she knew to be his Lordship's son,--from her ready assent to the betrothal, which certainly otherwise her father, after the recognition, would no longer have granted,--and from other signs which one will more easily gather up for himself on the second reading of this work. As was said, this hope, that she had all along known who he was, refuted certain objections of his delicacy and of his spirit of renunciation, and bloomed out still higher to-day, among so many joys and pleasant incidents.--Ah! if he had been devoid of all hope, then he would certainly, in the midst of the circle of so many blessed ones, have been obliged to fall as the last victim!--But that something in man, which always prefigures to him a great loss as so probable, and a great gain as so improbable, united with melancholy remembrances, now tormented his soul. He therefore begged Flamin to leave him alone for a while in the bower, and to hasten alone (as the Parson's wife was already in the garden) to the friendly arms of the newly-found sister and mother, and added that he would presently follow him. When Flamin was gone, Victor began to tremble more and more at the thought of the agitation of Clotilda, which would perhaps get the mastery of her at the intelligence of his pedigree; and it oppressed him sorely when he thought that for all in the garden sorrow had been removed from the black-hung mourning-chamber of earth, only for him haply not.--