"Cannot I do anything to help you?" said Victor, tenderly.
"Your father has immense influence over Prince January," said Flamin, "could you beg him to get me some court position at Flachsenfingen? If only I could make my way in the world, perhaps I might be able to hope to win at last the hand of my lady."
Victor at once promised to do all in his power; and the two friends, newly reattached to each other, came down from the watch-tower, and, with their arms lovingly entwined, they returned to the parsonage.
II.--Love
The next day Chamberlain Le Baut gave a garden party in honour of the son of the great English minister.
"Take good care!" said the chaplain's wife as Victor set off; "she is very beautiful."
Victor had no need to ask who "she" was.
"I shall take care not to take care," he replied, with a smile.
Victor was too much of a man of the world to fall in love at first sight. But when he entered the garden, and a sweet, tall, and lovely figure came forward to greet him from behind the foliage, he felt as if all his blood had been driven in his face. It was Clotilda. She spoke to him, but he listened to the melody of her voice, instead of to her words, so that he did not understand what she was saying. Her quiet, reserved eyes, however, brought him to his senses; but still he could not help feeling glad that, as Flamin's friend, he had some claim upon her attention and her society. It seemed to him as if everything that she did was done by her for the first time in life; and he would no doubt have shown a strange embarrassment in her company if the Lord Chamberlain and his wife and a throng of guests had not come into the garden and surrounded him and distracted him by their compliments. Recovering his self-possession, he concealed his real feelings by giving full play to his faculty for malicious and witty sayings. But though he succeeded in amusing the company, he displeased Clotilda; for the talk fell on the topic of women.
"The thing which a girl most easily forgets," said the Lord Chamberlain, "is how she looks; that is why she is always gazing into a mirror."