y, lost! The best on earth!" He laid his hands on
the tree-stem and pressed his head against it till it hurt him. He did
not know how to contain himself for misery and self-reproach. He felt
like a man who has been drunk and has reduced his own house to ashes in
his intoxication. How all this could have come to pass he now no longer
knew. After his nocturnal ride he had caused Nilus the treasurer to be
waked, and had charged him to liberate Hiram secretly. But it was the
sight of his stricken father that first brought him completely to his
sober senses. By his bed-side, death in its terrible reality had stared
him in the face, and he had felt that he could not bear to see that
beloved parent die till he had made his peace with Paula, won her
forgiveness, brought her whom his father loved so well into his
presence, and besought his blessing on her and on himself.

Twice he had hastened from the chamber of suffering to her room, to
entreat her to hear him, but in vain; and now, how terrible had their
parting been! She was hard, implacable, cruel; and as he recalled her
person and individuality as they had struck him before their quarrel, he
was forced to confess that there was something in her present behavior
which was not natural to her. This inhuman severity in the beautiful
woman whose affection had once been his, and who, but now, had flung his
flowers into the water, had not come from her heart; it was deliberately
planned to make him feel her anger. What had withheld her, under such
great provocation, from betraying that she had detected him in the theft
of the emerald? All was not yet lost; and he breathed more freely as
he went back to the house where duty, and his anxiety for his father,
required his presence. There were his flowers, floating on the stream.

"Hatred cast them there," thought he, "but before they reach the sea
many blossoms will have opened which were mere hard buds when she flung
them away. She can never love any man but me, I feel it, I know it. The
first time we looked into each other's eyes the fate of our hearts was
sealed. What she hates in me is my mad crime; what first set her against
me was her righteous anger at my suit for Katharina. But that sin was
but a dream in my life, which can never recur; and as for Katharina--I
have sinned against her once, but I will not continue to sin through
a whole, long lifetime. I have been permitted to trifle with love
unpunished so often, that at last