That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione, with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be related to you by me and by him. By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil, magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4] in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty, and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error, without taking a beautiful truth from Gione. The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots. Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the words, "She is no more." Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others' griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine. By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation, as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first death. To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled, "Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health. Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."