ends, who warned Adam, but he
answered them angrily, so they learned to be silent.

Florette had now grown gay again, and sometimes sang like a joyous bird.

Seven years elapsed, and during the summer of the eighth a scattered
troop of soldiers came to the city and obtained admission. They were
quartered under the arches of the town-hall, but many also lay in the
smithy, for their helmets, breast-plates and other pieces of armor
required plenty of mending. The ensign, a handsome, proud young fellow,
with a dainty moustache, was Adam's most constant customer, and played
very kindly with Ulrich, when Florette appeared with him. At last the
young soldier departed, and the very same day Adam was summoned to the
monastery, to mend something in the grating before the treasury.

When he returned, Florette had vanished; "run after the ensign," people
said, and they were right. Adam did not attempt to wrest her from the
seducer; but a great love cannot be torn from the heart like a staff
that is thrust into the ground; it is intertwined with a thousand
fibres, and to destroy it utterly is to destroy the heart in which it
has taken root, and with it life itself. When he secretly cursed her
and called her a viper, he doubtless remembered how innocent, dear and
joyous she had been, and then the roots of the destroyed affection put
forth new shoots, and he saw before his mental vision ensnaring images,
of which he felt ashamed as soon as they had vanished.

Lightning and hail had entered the "delightful garden" of Adam's life
also, and he had been thrust forth from the little circle of the happy
into the great army of the wretched.

Purifying powers dwell in undeserved suffering, but no one is made
better by unmerited disgrace, least of all a man like Adam. He had done
what seemed to him his duty, without looking to the right or the left,
but now the stainless man felt himself dishonored, and with morbid
sensitiveness referred everything he saw and heard to his own disgrace,
while the inhabitants of the little town made him feel that he had been
ill-advised, when he ventured to make a fiddler's daughter a citizen.

When he went out, it seemed to him--and usually unjustly--as if people
were nudging each other; hands, pointing out-stretched fingers at
him, appeared to grow from every eye. At home he found nothing but
desolation, vacuity, sorrow, and a child, who constantly tore open the
burning, gnawing wounds in his heart. Ulric