He cried it aloud, stamping his foot on the wet ground, while in the branches of the trees overhead the wind whistled and howled, and louder and louder grew the roar of the sea breaking against the barrier which it only needed to surmount to fill the hollow like a basin. Even the park would be swept away then. He hardly knew why he had entered the park; perhaps to look for François, perhaps because he had been told that from the balcony of the summer-house in the south corner a long stretch of the road to Wissow over the hills could be seen. If indeed in the darkness, which seemed deepening at every moment, anything could be seen at a distance! And where was this south corner? As if between the brambles of these rustling hedges, and in the gloom of these creaking boughs, a man could find his way as one would between the laurel bushes and the pines of the Monte Pincio! In this howling northern wilderness the image of the Eternal City stood suddenly before his mind, as he had seen it that night when, for the first time after years of separation, he saw Valerie again--by no effort of his, against all expectation or hope--at a fête given by the French Embassy in the enchanted gardens of the Villa Medici. There, when a jealous husband had carried away his beautiful wife only too soon, he himself had left the festive crowd, and ascended the stone steps in the shade of the evergreen oaks till the lights of the festival below him had been lost and the sounds had died away; there, in the darkness and silence which surrounded him, he had mused as he went yet farther and higher, and reached the Belvedere, where his beloved Rome, bathed in moonshine, lay at his feet; there he had sworn by St. Peter's, on whose gigantic dome streams of soft golden light were pouring down from the blue heavens, that the love of this fair northern woman should be the golden stepping-stone to his power, which he, the layman, in the service of St. Peter's, and yet free--free as an eagle here above the world--would extend over the whole earth. It had taken him longer than he had then hoped--much too long; he had held fast to his once formed plans with too obstinate tenacity; he might have attained more brilliant results, quicker and more surely, by other ways such as had a thousand times offered themselves; but it was the star of his fate which he had followed, in which he had always trusted, and would trust still when--at the last moment--everything seemed to conspire against him to snatch his prey from him, the fruit of the arduous labour of so many years, the noble fortune which he carried about him close to his body, as if it were a part of himself, as it was indeed a part of his life which he would give up only with that life.