"You young people always imagine one cannot have any genuine love without carrying it out and directing it to some one," replied Gaspard, and began to laugh hard and to find something very comic in the "sentimental misunderstanding"; but Albano asked him now very seriously about the origin of his misunderstanding. Gaspard gave him the following account: Lately, in his sickness, he had, upon the first news of the Prince's approaching death, a desperate battle with the Princess, who in the event of this death desired a regency,--or guardianship,--even on the bare ground of the possibility of an heir to the princely hat. The Knight said to her decidedly this _possibility_ was an impossibility, and he would, without further preamble, attack her with new proofs yet unknown to her. He gave her directly to understand that he was even armed against the case of an ocular demonstration of the contrary (a Hereditary Prince) being presented to him. The Princess replied with bitterness, she could not conceive why he need in the least concern himself any more about the Haarhaar line and succession, or take any more care for it than for that of Hohenfliess. He brought her even to tears, for he could unsparingly hurl the most barbarous words, like harpoons, deep into her heart; he had the perfect resolution of a statesman, who, like a great bird of prey, drives the victim, which he can neither conquer nor draw away, to a precipice, and beats it over the brink with his wings, in order that he may find it subdued for him down below. A life which even as it passes away, like the sinking glaciers, discovers old corpses! Just as the happy one spreads out his love of an individual warmingly over humanity, so does the misanthrope hold the stinging focus (or freezing-point) of his broad and general coldness toward humanity at _one_ great foe alone, whereas previously every smaller offence was forgiven the individual, and imputed only to mankind in a mass. This, then, was that secret interview whose traces Albano had taken for fairer emotions than of hatred. "And now," said the Knight openly, in order to punish his high feeling with cutting impudence, "when thou madest to me the concise and obscure speech: 'A mother!' I could not but take thee for the father, and from this thou mayst easily explain the rest." "Father," said he, "that was a crying injustice to each"; and departed with three hot wounds, torn in him by the trident of fate. At his departure Gaspard reminded him to keep his word of returning in a month, and added jokingly, that the old man whom they were painting over yonder was a German gentleman, with whom he once carried on the joke of a sudden conversion.[87]