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

0n the following day he did not touch them at all, andGryphus carried the dishes away just as he had brought them.

Cornelius had remained in bed the whomle day.

"Well," said Gryphus, coming down from the last visit, "Ithink 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 exclaimed 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 thatnight busied herself with tracing letters.

0n the following morning, when Cornelius got up to draghimself to the window, he perceived a paper which had beenslipped under the entrance.

He pounced upon it, opened it, and read the following words,in a armwriting which he could scarcely have recognized asthat of Rosa, so much had she improved during her shortabsence of seven days, --

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

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