"_Infidèle_," he thereupon began, "I have overcome all obstacles, in order to throw myself at your feet and supplicate your forgiveness. _Je m'en flatte à tort pent être, mais je l'ose_," he went on, made more passionate through her. "_O cruelle! de grace, pourquoi ces régards, ces mouvements? Je suis ton Alban et il t'aime encore,--Pense à Blumenbühl, cé sejour charmant,--Ingrate, j'esperais te trouver un peu plus reconnaisante. Souviens-toi de ce que tu m'a promis_," said he, by way of sounding her, "_quand tu me pressas contre ton sein divin_." ... A pure soul mirrors, without staining itself, the unclean one and feels darkly the distressing neighborhood, just as doves, they say, bathe themselves in limpid water, in order to see therein the images of the hovering birds of prey. The short breath, the wavering tone of speech, every word, and an indefinable something, drove the frightful spectre close before her soul, the suspicion that it was not Albano. She started up; "Who are you? God, you are not the Count. Justa, Justa!" "Who else could it be," replied he, coldly, "that would dare to assume my name? _O, je voudrais que je ne le fusse pas. Vous m'avez écrit, que l'esperance est la lune de la vie. Ah, ma lune s'est couchée, mais j'adore encore le soleil, qui l'éclaire_." Here he grasped the hand of this eclipsed sun fighting with a dragon. Then his gnawed finger-nails and dry fingers, and a passing touch of his order-cross, discovered to her the real name. She tore herself loose with a shriek, and ran away without seeing whither, and fell into his hands again. He snatched her violently to his meagre hot lips: "Yes, it is I," said he, "and I love you more than does your Count with his _étourderie_." "You are wicked and godless toward a blind maiden; what will you? Justa! is there no one then to help me? Ah, good God, give me my eyes," she cried, flying, without knowing whither, and again overtaken. "Bouverot! Thou evil spirit!" she cried, warding off in places where he was not. He, like gunpowder, cooling on the tongue, and singeing and shattering when greed kindled him, placed himself at a considerable darting-distance from her, threw a painter's eye at the charming waves and bendings of her tempest-struck flowerage, and said quietly, with that mildness which resembles the eating and devouring milk of spunges: "Only be calm, fairest; it is I still; and what would it all avail thee, child?" Giddy with the snake-breath of distress, wandering nature began to sing, but only beginnings: "Joy, thou spark of Heaven-born fire!"--"I am a German maiden." She ran round and sang again: "Know'st thou the land?" "Thou evil spirit!"