In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,--both contented with a separation which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was--afterthought, or rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor. He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he--as I hope my reader has--discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.--The pupil of Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to quench in tears of mourning her first love.--But Emanuel communicates his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.--She returns unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.--But her good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak with her about Flamin's relationship.--He goes to court, and seems to forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents, either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again, and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting, at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.----Ay, thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!----As, now, Victor thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse, where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his father,--and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a