pasture,--a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it. The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the trouble of--closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this _insight_ into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by chance--or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,--he breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's, sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that is the beginning of my own name." His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a sick-chamber at the Abbess's,--the very one Giulia had had,--that the fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable _his_ great friend to stand upright.