ft yesterday, I could no longer keep
silent, but said in a rapture, "Fairest Lady fair, accept these
flowers too, and all the flowers in my garden, and everything I have!
Ah, if I could only brave some danger for you!" At first she had
looked at me so gravely, almost angrily, that I shivered, but then
she cast down her eyes, and did not lift them while I was speaking. At
that moment voices and the tramp of horses were heard in the distance.
She snatched the flowers from my hand, and without saying a word,
swiftly vanished at the end of the avenue.

After this evening I had neither rest nor peace. I felt continually,
as I had always felt when spring was at hand, restless and merry, and
as if some great good fortune or something extraordinary were about
to befall me. My wretched accounts in especial never would come right,
and when the sunshine, playing among the chestnut boughs before my
window, cast golden-green gleams upon my figures, illuminating "Bro't
over" and "Total," my addition grew sometimes so confused that I
actually could not count three. The figure "eight" always looked to
me like my stout, tightly-laced lady with the gay head-dress, and
the provoking "seven" like a finger-post pointing the wrong way, or a
gallows. The "nine" was the queerest, suddenly, before I knew what it
was about, standing on its head to look like "six," whilst "two" would
turn into a pert interrogation-point, as if to ask me, "What in the
world is to become of you, you poor zero? Without the others, the
slender 'one' and all the rest, you never can come to anything!"

I had no longer any ease in sitting before my door. I took out a stool
to make myself more comfortable, and put my feet upon it; I patched up
an old parasol, and held it over me like a Chinese pleasure-dome. But
all would not do. As I sat smoking and speculating, my legs seemed
to stretch to twice their size from weariness, and my nose lengthened
visibly as I looked down at it for hours. And when sometimes, before
daybreak, an express drove up, and I went out, half asleep, into the
cool air, and a pretty face, but dimly seen in the dawning except for
its sparkling eyes, looked out at me from the coach window and kindly
bade me good-morning, while from the villages around the cock's clear
crow echoed across the fields of gently-waving grain, and an early
lark, high in the skies among the flushes of morning, soared here and
there, and the Postilion wound his horn and blew