His anxiety was simply this, lest his father should arrive earlier than his mother went off,--for he knew the Minister. The latter intended, according to his letters, to arrive on Monday or Tuesday (Saturday at the latest); but this might--as Froulay loved to let his friends swim in the broad play-room of expectation--still more certainly threaten that he--because, like the Basle clocks,[171] he always struck an hour too early, and came in the hope of catching his people at some right odious thing--might at any minute come driving in at the court-yard gate. If he came driving furiously up this forenoon, or at the moment when the servant was lifting the daughter into the carriage, and the mother already sat therein, then was this much certain, by a thousand conclusions from observance, that both would have to go up into the house again; that he would order all trunks and boxes unpacked, and, as to the daughter of the Provincial Director, after her ten thousand entreaties,--although her very second would freeze upon her lips,--he would, in a friendly manner, with quite jocose equanimity, let her be carried home, as a solitary member of a conclave, in a close carriage. Certain men--and he is their generalissimo--know no sweeter cordial for themselves, than to put under lock and key, before the very nose of their friends, the garden-gates of some Arcadia or other, for which they have not drawn up for them a map of the route and region, and judicially to seal them up. Besides, just before a pleasure party, most parents secrete gall; if Froulay, in fact, could absolutely prevent one, that was as much for him as if he were himself returning home from one red and gay. At three o'clock in the afternoon, our friends went to walk beneath the loveliest sky. Everything had been already arranged; Charles proposed to follow to-morrow; Albano not till Monday, after the general return (his tender motives, and the hard ones of others, decided it); and there floated through the whole vaulted blue no cloud but Charles's concern lest the second depositing of the princely corpse might draw his father along as early as to-day,... when he suddenly cried out, with a curse: "There he comes!" He knew him by the tiger-spotted post-team, and still more by the long line of horses tackled on tandem. A purgatorial moment of life! The carriage rattled swiftly down the street; the head horses streamed forth in a longer and quite disorderly train; the people stared. At last the pulling distance became an acre long,--that seemed quite impossible,--when Albano's eagle eye discovered that there was no leather connection between the post-train, and at last, that in fact there was merely a strange churl, with two horses, accidentally riding along before the carriage, and at this moment they saw the open triumphal car, with the female trinity slowly moving up the Blumenbühl heights, and the blended tulip-bed of the three parasols glimmered long after them. FOOTNOTES: