Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/163

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

“I hope nobody is ill at Lœvestein?”

“Nobody,” replied, even more laconically, the jailor, 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 now was 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 in-