How if Rosa allowed the right moment for planting the bulb to pass by,--if, in addition to the grief of seeing her no more, he should have to deplore the misfortune of seeing his tulip fail on account of its having been planted too late, or of its not having been planted at all! These two vexations combined might well make him leave off eating and drinking.
This was the case on the fourth day.
It was pitiful to see Cornelius, dumb with grief, and pale from utter prostration, stretch out his head through the iron bars of his window, at the risk of not being able to draw it back again, to try and get a glimpse of the garden on the left spoken of by Rosa, who had told him that its parapet overlooked the river.

He hoped that perhaps he might see, in the light of the April sun, Rosa or the tulip, the two lost objects of his love.
In the evening, Gryphus took away the breakfast and dinner of Cornelius, who had scarcely touched them.
On the following day he did not touch them at all, and Gryphus carried the dishes away just as he had brought them.
Cornelius had remained in bed the whole day.
"Well," said Gryphus, coming down from the last visit, "I think 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 said 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 that night busied herself with tracing letters.
On the following morning, when Cornelius got up to drag himself to the window, he perceived a paper which had been slipped under the door.
He pounced upon it, opened it, and read the following words, in a handwriting which he could scarcely have recognized as that of Rosa, so much had she improved during her short absence of seven days,-- "Be easy; your tulip is going on well." Although these few words of Rosa's somewhat soothed the grief of Cornelius, yet he felt not the less the irony which was at the bottom of them.

Rosa, then, was not ill, she was offended; she had not been forcibly prevented from coming, but had voluntarily stayed away.