Let us lead up the deluded maiden and her million companions with some words before a mild judge! This is not the only thing which that judge will weigh, that she, stupefied by the blossom-dust of a reeking spring season of joys, smothered into dumbness with the virgin's veil, prostrate before the storm of fancy (as women fall so much the more easily before another's fancy and a poetic one, the seldomer their own blows upon them, and accustoms them to standing firmly), suffered the reward of a whole virgin life to die; but this is what most strongly mitigates the sentence, that she bore love in her heart. Why, then, do not the male sex recognize that the loving female, in the hour of love, will really do nothing less than all for her beloved, that woman has all power _for_ love, _against_ which she has so little, and that she, with the same soul and at the same moment, would just as readily sacrifice her life as her virtue, and that only the demanding and taking party is bad, deliberately and selfishly? The last or seventh chapter of his robber romance is very short and contradictory. The third day he visited her in her garden, was delicate, rational, temperate, reserved, as if he were a married man. As he found her full of trouble, which she, however, only half expressed, he accordingly, out of anxiety for her health, came again several times; and, when he found that she had not suffered in the least, he stayed--away. Towards Albano, during the aforesaid anxiety, he behaved meekly, and, after it, he was the same as ever, but not long; for when his sister, whom of all human beings he perhaps loved most purely, became blind through Albano's wildness, he then, even on account of a similarity of guilt, flung at him a real hatred, and something like it at all his (Albano's) relations. Rabette got nothing from him now but--letters and apologies, short pictures of his wild nature, which must, he said, have free play-room, and which, fastened to another, must beat and bruise and gall that one with the chain quite as much as itself. All objections of Rabette's he knew how to remove so well, as they consisted only in words, and not in looks and tears, that he at last himself began to perceive he was right; and almost nothing was left to the poor May-flower, crushed by the fall of this smooth May-pole, than the real last word,--namely, the mute life, which is not the first thing to announce to the murderer that he has smitten and destroyed a heart. 88. CYCLE. Here is Roquairol's letter to Albano:-- "It must once be, and be over; we must see each other as we are, and then hate each other, if it must be so. I make thy sister unhappy; thou makest mine unhappy and me too; these things just balance each other. Thou distortedst thyself out of an angel to me more and more passionately into a destroying angel. Strangle me, then, but I grapple thee too.