To tell the truth, there was in all this some selfish hope to hear from Gryphus that his daughter was ill.
Except on extraordinary occasions, Rosa never came during the day.
Cornelius therefore did not really expect her as long as the day lasted.
Yet his sudden starts, his listening at the door, his rapid glances at every little noise towards the grated window, showed clearly that the prisoner entertained some latent hope that Rosa would, somehow or other, break her rule.
At the second visit of Gryphus, Cornelius, contrary to all his former habits, asked the old jailer, with the most winning voice, about her health; but Gryphus contented himself with giving the laconical answer,-- "All's well." At the third visit of the day, Cornelius changed his former inquiry:-- "I hope nobody is ill at Loewestein ?" "Nobody," replied, even more laconically, the jailer, 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 was now 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 interview, the following day as the time for that momentous operation.

The weather was propitious; the air, though still damp, began to be tempered by those pale rays of the April sun which, being the first, appear so congenial, although so pale.