th grief, and pale from utter
prostration, stretch out his head through the iron bars of his window,
at the risk of not being able to draw it back again, to try and get a
glimpse of the garden on the left spoken of by Rosa, who had told him
that its parapet overlooked the river. He hoped that perhaps he might
see, in the light of the April sun, Rosa or the tulip, the two lost
objects of his love.

In the evening, Gryphus took away the breakfast and dinner of Cornelius,
who had scarcely touched them.

On the following day he did not touch them at all, and Gryphus carried
the dishes away just as he had brought them.

Cornelius had remained in bed the whole day.

"Well," said Gryphus, coming down from the last visit, "I think we shall
soon get rid of our scholar."

Rosa was startled.

"Nonsense!" said Jacob. "What do you mean?"

"He doesn't drink, he doesn't eat, he doesn't leave his bed. He will get
out of it, like Mynheer Grotius, in a chest, only the chest will be a
coffin."

Rosa grew pale as death.

"Ah!" she said to herself, "he is uneasy about his tulip."

And, rising with a heavy heart, she returned to her chamber, where she
took a pen and paper, and during the whole of that night busied herself
with tracing letters.

On the following morning, when Cornelius got up to drag himself to the
window, he perceived a paper which had been slipped under the door.

He pounced upon it, opened it, and read the following words, in a
handwriting which he could scarcely have recognized as that of Rosa, so
much had she improved during her short absence of seven days,--

"Be easy; your tulip is going on well."

Although these few words of Rosa's somewhat soothed the grief of
Cornelius, yet he felt not the less the irony which was at the bottom
of them. Rosa, then, was not ill, she was offended; she had not been
forcibly prevented from coming, but had voluntarily stayed away. Thus
Rosa, being at liberty, found in her own will the force not to come and
see him, who was dying with grief at not having seen her.

Cornelius had paper and a pencil which Rosa had brought to him. He
guessed that she expected an answer, but that she would not come before
the evening to fetch it. He therefore wrote on a piece of paper, similar
to that which he had received,--

"It was not my anxiety about the tulip that has made me ill, but the
grief at not seeing you."

After Gryphus had made his last visit of the day, and darkness had