The gentle form stepped quietly into her father's presence, and there, shrinking not before thunder and lightning, carried her explanation through to a close, saying that she severely rued her disapproved love, that she would bear all penalties, and do and suffer all, both here and with the Princess, as "_cher père_" should demand, but that she dared not longer offend the innocent Count of Zesara by the show of a most undutiful desertion. At this address the Minister, who had suffered himself, in consequence of her recent submissive self-denial, to be lifted up by refreshing expectations, now stretched prostrate on the ground, dashed down from his Tarpeian rock, could not utter a single sound but this: "Imbécille! thou marriest Herr von Bouverot; he takes thy picture tomorrow; thou sittest to him." He took her, with stern hand and three terribly long strides, to his lady. "She will remain," said he, "under guard in her chamber; no one may visit her except my son-in-law; he will paint the Imbécille _en miniature_." "Go, Imbécille!" said he, beside himself. Her entire want of womanly cunning had actually, to the statesman, drawn a curtain over her deep, sharp eye. A straightforward man and mind resembles a straight alley, which appears only half as long as one which runs by crooks and turns. The Lector, who never meant to be regarded as a special amateur of connubial sham-fights, had already taken himself off. The thirty years' war of the spouses--for it only wanted a few years of that--gained life and reinforcement. The old bridegroom diffused over his face that convulsive smile which, with some men, resembles the convulsive quiver of the cork when it announces the bite of the fish. He asked whether he were now wrong in trusting neither daughter nor mother, both of whom he charged with a partisan understanding against him, and insisted that now, after such proofs, he ought not to be blamed either for stricter measures or for a straightforward march to his object; and with the sitting, for which the German gentleman had twice begged him, he commenced the campaign. The Minister's lady, as a punishment for Liana, remained silent on the subject of so excessively great a present to Bouverot as a miniature likeness would be. The tender daughter, jammed and crushed in the meeting between two stone statues, represented to her mother, that she could not possibly hold out under so long inspection of a man's eye, and least of all Herr von Bouverot's, whose looks often went like thorns into her soul. Hereupon the father replied and retorted in the mother's name, by drawing a chair up to the desk, and inviting, on the spot, the German gentleman to come to-morrow and paint. Then Liana was sent away with a word which drew even from this delicate flower the lightning-spark of a momentary hatred.