He kissed Giulia's brow; sobbing, she sank into his arms.
"Fate has foiled my most glorious plans of life, we cannot return to the desolate Castle. Your sudden flight injured my name again, the people there will not associate with us, but the world is large! Although my life has been a failure, although I must stay far from my home, there yet remains to me the thinker's dream and the ecstasy of love."
"Not for my sake shall you fly from all," said Giulia imploringly.
"I, too, am dead to this portion of the world. I can do nothing more for my fatherland. This bullet has rendered me unfit for war, a chain of unfortunate circumstances for peace. I cannot stand before any electors, a political career is closed to me. Thus I fly for my sake also, and you, my fondly loved wife, I take with me as comforter. The registry at San Giulio still tells of your guilt, we must away, far away from here. I know a land, the cradle of the gods, perhaps the cradle of mankind, a wonder land. There beneath the giant mountain lies the Walar Lake, and the Behat winds through a paradise of rustling fruit trees and prolific plains upon which gaze down glaciers high as heaven. Beautiful beings wander there in the most blessed valley of the world, and there free from the constraint of law and the trammels of society, which here rule the world, we will build ourselves huts and I will introduce you to the profound wisdom of the land of the lotus-flowers. Follow me to Cashmere."
Giulia pressed him to her heart, "I have no will but yours."
Blanden wrote to Wegen and begged him to sell Kulmitten, Rositten, and Nehren. His friend, Olga's happy husband, doubly happy by her unexpected mastery of the art of cooking, executed Blanden's commission, and by means of a large inheritance, was enabled to buy Kulmitten, the principal estate, for himself.
To Kuhl, however, who really had invited no living creature excepting Caro, to his wedding dinner, Blanden wrote--
"I go far away, to the primeval home of mankind; I am a shipwrecked mariner, and, united to Giulia, shall build myself a hut in the desert. Withered leaves--they fell upon the flowers of my heart, and twice have covered and crushed out their life. My friend! no man can overcome his past. Unforeseen it rises again like a spectre and stretches the destroyer's hand into our lives. Poor Eva was the victim of one of those fearful chains of events which, long invisible, suddenly seize us with a ghostly grasp. That I had loved the mother, was the daughter's death! Withered leaves--vainly my Giulia amid bitterest pain sought to wrench herself loose from her past, but it held her firmly as in an iron vice. Away into the kingdom of Buddha, into the dream-world of the East! I could not live as I would, therefore now I will live as I can."
Not long after a Hamburg steamboat bore the loving pair into the land of the lotus-flowers.