"Now was I half and half resolved to become pregnant, and in this guise to demand everything for my satisfaction, which even the Spanish King refuses to no pregnant woman.[135] In Italy they carry the child on the arm, in order to beg; in Spain it needs not so much as this visibleness. But fortunately thy uncle came. The picture-gallery door was thrown open. I set myself to copying a stupid kitchen-piece, and looked everywhere after my island portrait. But nothing was to be seen." (Here he drew a wooden case out of his hunting-bag, and laid it before him and went on.) "Until at last I saw it,--a picture leaned on the floor against the wall, turning toward me its back- and wintry-side,--it was the child of my pencil, and I was touched by the neglect it had suffered,--inwardly vexed, but outwardly calm, I put it by,--and snapped off short in the kitchen-piece in the middle of a half-finished pole-cat. Look at the likeness!" He took off the box-cover, and Linda beamed upon his friend with a stream of mind and charms, only dressed in older fashion. Albano could scarcely stammer for emotion. "That were my father's spouse and my dear mother? And thou knowest assuredly that this picture here is the one you made of her on Isola Bella?" "I'll just make it manifest," said he, and scoured away at a rose in the picture about the region of the heart. "My then Paphos-name _Loewenskiould_ lies _sub rosa_ and will be immediately forthcoming. Had I already scraped it open on the road, then you would have believed I had on the road for the first written myself in." As from a ghostly writing hand Albano started back shuddering, when actually an L and an Ö came forth from under the rose: "I shall clear away no further now," said Schoppe, "the rest I keep for her." Albano now poured out his heart before his honest heart's-friend; to him he could say and object that Julienne was his sister,--"against which I have nothing at all to say," said Schoppe,--and that Gaspard had approved an intended marriage between him and Linda. "There is no getting away from it," he added; "if she is his daughter, then I am not his son,--I cannot possibly make his sacred word of honor a lie--and, God! into what a monstrous pit and pool of crime must one then look down!" "Touching the word and the pool," said Schoppe, quite coldly, "there are specious proofs to be adduced (although, to be sure, I have before this spoken superfluously on the subject with thy father, and with the Countess), that the Baldhead, who, as he confessed to me, has been thy father's mass-assistant, groomsman, and bear-leader, was not a man of the freshest morals, but that he--although otherwise upright in many saddles _except_ the moral--had his hours and centuries when he acted as such a dog and highwayman, that my hound there is a calendar-saint and father of the Church to him. Only I ought not to have blown out the lamp of his life, which of course stank more than it shone."