_pockets_ and _buttonholes_ are wanting; what pleasure can they hold, then?" Albano looked upon him with amazement. "Knowest thou, Albano, what I mean? Just the opposite." So easy is everything for fancy, even freaks of humor. At this moment he was called out. He came back with a red billet-doux. He put on his cravat,--he had been sitting there _à la Hamlet_,--and said to Albano he would fly back in an hour. At the threshold he paused, still thinking whether he should go, then ran swiftly up the steps. In Albano the cup of joy, into which the whole day had been pouring, overflowed with the sparkling foam of a waggish humor. By heaven! drollery became him as charmingly as an emotion, and he often walked round for a long time without speaking, with a roguish smile, as slumbering children smile, when, as the saying is, angels are playing with them. Roquairol came back with strangely excited eyes; he had stormed wildly into his heart; he had been wicked, for the sake of despairing, and then, on his knees, at the bottom of the precipice, confessing to his friend the nature of his life. This man, so wilful, lay involuntarily bound to the windmill wings of his fancy, and was now fettered by a calm, now whirled round by the storm, which he imagined himself cutting through. He was now, after the analogy of the fire-eaters, a fire-drinker, in the uneasy expectation of Schoppe's departure. The latter departed at last, despite Albano's entreaty, with the answer: "_Redeem the time_, says the Apostle; but that means, Prolong your life all you can: _that_ is time. To this end the best shops of the times, the apothecaries', require that a man, after _punch royal_, shall go to bed and sweat immoderately." Now how changed was all! When Zesara joyfully fell on his neck,--when the delirium of youth grew to the melodies of love, as the rain in Derbyshire-hollow at a distance becomes harmonies,--when from the Count's lips flowed sweetly, as one bleeds in his sleep, his whole inner being, his whole past life, and all his plans of the future, even the proudest (only not the tenderest one),--and when, like Adam in the state of innocence (according to Madame Bourignon), he placed himself in such crystal transparency before his friend's eye, not from weakness, but from old instinct, and in the faith that such his friend must be,--then did tears of the most loving admiration come into the eyes of the unhappy Roquairol at the unvarnished purity, and at the energetic, credulous, unsophisticated nature, and at the almost smile-provoking _naïve_ and lofty earnestness of the red-cheeked youth. He sobbed upon that joy-drunken bosom, and Albano grew tender, because he thought he was too little so, and his friend so very much in that mood.