He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning orbit.--For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding apple-fruit.... Dear æsthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's _globe de compression_,[32]--over this _waxing_ moon-globe, whereof one never sees the other half,--near this commanding eminence, which, like other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,--and that too at a court where generally the _dress-regulations_ suppress everything _elevated_? When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,--but now it must first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire. He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings. Besides, a new circumstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm. A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superincumbent snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled goddess moved mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything, out of this enchanted heaven. Too late!--The ribbon is down from her eyes,--perhaps his sigh had been too near, or his silence too long. And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he hung in the petrified posture,--her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly overflowed with the milder light of love,--ardently and softly she said, _Comment?_ And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing, dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a bloody chemise-pin.