The next day the sun rose with joyous brightness in a sky clear as crystal. Storm, wind, and rain had vanished like the flying phantoms of an evil dream, and all the beautiful land sparkled with light and life in its enlacing girdle of turquoise blue sea. The gardens of the Royal palace, freshened by the downpour of the past night, wore their most enchanting aspect,--roses, with leaves still wet, dropped their scented petals on the grass,--great lilies, with their snowy cups brimming with rain, hung heavily on their slim green stalks, and the air was full of the deliciously penetrating odour of the mimosa and sweetbriar. Down one special alley, where the white philadelphus, or ‘mock orange’ grew in thick bushes on either side, intermingled with ferns and spruce firs, whose young green tips exhaled a pungent, healthy scent that entered into the blood like wine and invigorated it, Sir Roger de Launay was pacing to and fro with a swinging step which, notwithstanding its ease and soldierly regularity, suggested something of impatience, and on a rustic seat, above which great clusters of the philadelphus-flowers hung like a canopy, sat Professor von Glauben, spectacles on nose, sorting a few letters which he had just taken from his pocket for the purpose of reading them over again carefully one by one. He was a very particular man as regarded his correspondence. All letters that required answering he answered at once,--the others, as he himself declared, ‘answered themselves’ in silence. “There is no end to the crop of fools in this world,” he was fond of saying;--“Glorious, precious fools! I love them all! They make life worth living--but sometimes I am disposed to draw the line at letter-writing fools. These persons chance to read a book--my book for example,--that particularly clever one I wrote on the possibilities of eternal life in this world. They at once snatch their pens and write to say that they are specially deserving of this boon, and wish to live for ever--will I tell them how? And these are the very creatures I will not tell how--because their perpetual existence would be a mistake and a nuisance! The individuals whose lives are really valuable never ask anyone how to make them so.” He looked over his letters now with a leisurely indifference. The morning’s post had brought him nothing of special importance. He glanced from his reading now and again at De Launay marching up and down, but said nothing till he had quite finished with his own immediate concerns. Then he removed his spectacles from his nose and put them by. “Left--Right--Left--Right--Left--Right! Roger, you remind me of my drilling days on a certain flat and dusty ground at Coblentz! The Rhine!--the Rhine! Ah, the beautiful Rhine! So dirty--so dull--with its toy castles, and its big, ugly factory chimneys, and its atrociously bad wine! Roger, I beseech you to have mercy upon me, and leave off that marching up and down,--it gets on my nerves!”