"There," said he to Balder, "we've done with that too! I can put the little bottle of violet perfume on this painted plate--two frail mementoes of a life and memories quite out of place in our tun. Come, child! We'll get to work again. Everything flows steadily on; ought not certain memories to find their way also to the great ocean?" BOOK III. CHAPTER I. A fortnight had elapsed. The autumnal storms, which had burst over the country, had stripped the last withered leaf from the top of the acacia tree, and the little garden with its shade loving plants, as well as the dry tendrils of the bean vines, were destroyed by the ceaseless rain. Even in the "tun," whose inmates usually possessed the art of making the sunlight within shine all the more brightly in the stormiest weather, a strangely dull, sorrowful mood had prevailed, like the autumn mists which float over forest and meadow, and are only now and then lighted by a noontide sunbeam. A dull oppression weighed upon Edwin's mind, and with all his manliness he was unable to shake it off. This mysterious silence and disappearance caused him more pain than the sharpest break in his life, the most open renunciation on the part of the beloved being. He hourly felt that all must be past, but he could not yet realize it to be at an end. It was as if he carried a bullet in his body very near the vital organs, and until it was extracted, no one could tell whether he would survive or bleed to death.