The fresh spring breeze swept through the trees, and drove the laden-blossomed elder-bushes tapping against the windowpanes, as if to offer a May-greeting to the lonely king.

The servant in waiting stole on tiptoe to the door of the anteroom, listening breathlessly at the key-hole to the moving melody.
Even Alkmene suddenly raised her head as if something unusual were taking place, fixed her great eyes upon her master, jumping upon his knee, and resting her fore-paws lovingly upon his breast.
Frederick neither observed nor felt the movement of his favorite; his thoughts were absent from the present--absent from the earth! They were wandering in the unknown future, with the spirits of those he longed to see again in the Elysian fields.
The wailing music of his flute expressed the lamentation of his soul, and his eyes filled with tears as he raised them to the bust of Voltaire, gazing at it with a look of pain until the melody was finished.

Then abruptly turning, half unwillingly, half angrily, he returned the flute to the box, and stole away, covering his face with his hands, as if to hide his emotion from himself.
"Now we have finished with the dead, and the living claim our thoughts," sighed the king.

"What an absurd thing is the human heart! It will never grow cold or old; always pretending to a spark of the fire which that shameful fellow Prometheus stole from the gods.

What an absurdity! What have I, an old fellow, to do with the fire of Prometheus, when the fire of war will soon rage around me," At this instant the door gently opened.