ornelius, contrary to all his former
habits, asked the old jailer, with the most winning voice, about
her health; but Gryphus contented himself with giving the laconical
answer,--

"All's well."

At the third visit of the day, Cornelius changed his former inquiry:--

"I hope nobody is ill at Loewestein?"

"Nobody," replied, even more laconically, the jailer, shutting the door
before the nose of the prisoner.

Gryphus, being little used to this sort of civility on the part of
Cornelius, began to suspect that his prisoner was about to try and bribe
him.

Cornelius was now alone once more; it was seven o'clock in the evening,
and the anxiety of yesterday returned with increased intensity.

But another time the hours passed away without bringing the sweet vision
which lighted up, through the grated window, the cell of poor Cornelius,
and which, in retiring, left light enough in his heart to last until it
came back again.

Van Baerle passed the night in an agony of despair. On the following
day Gryphus appeared to him even more hideous, brutal, and hateful than
usual; in his mind, or rather in his heart, there had been some hope
that it was the old man who prevented his daughter from coming.

In his wrath he would have strangled Gryphus, but would not this have
separated him for ever from Rosa?

The evening closing in, his despair changed into melancholy, which
was the more gloomy as, involuntarily, Van Baerle mixed up with it the
thought of his poor tulip. It was now just that week in April which the
most experienced gardeners point out as the precise time when tulips
ought to be planted. He had said to Rosa,--

"I shall tell you the day when you are to put the bulb in the ground."

He had intended to fix, at the vainly hoped for interview, the
following day as the time for that momentous operation. The weather was
propitious; the air, though still damp, began to be tempered by those
pale rays of the April sun which, being the first, appear so congenial,
although so pale. How if Rosa allowed the right moment for planting the
bulb to pass by,--if, in addition to the grief of seeing her no more,
he should have to deplore the misfortune of seeing his tulip fail on
account of its having been planted too late, or of its not having been
planted at all!

These two vexations combined might well make him leave off eating and
drinking.

This was the case on the fourth day.

It was pitiful to see Cornelius, dumb wi