from her side. The Minister daubed and starched up with old gallantries the erotic slave; but to every one he appeared, as the Princess settles with creditors after the death of the Prince, to imitate only the manner of ministers, whose spirit loves to proceed from Father and Dauphin--filioque^[12]--at once, in order to seat itself, not between, but upon two princely chairs. She seemed, however, since his manœuvring with Liana, to receive him more haughtily. He was sufficiently blessed in the good fortune of his daughter, as his step-son Bouverot was by her nearness, and this pair of knaves lay deeply buried and revelling in nothing but flowers. Albano could divine nothing more than that even a cold dragon, an orang-outang of souls, was darkly spying out the charms of this angel.

The Minister's lady and the Lector took turns, with an easy alternation, in guarding Liana from every word--of Albano. The Princess let herself be conducted through the sparkling pleasure-avenues, through the enchanted wood which was standing in moist lightnings, and finally to the thunder-house, by way of taking the burning garden from all points into her picturesque eye; Liana and Albano attended her through all the walks of her withered, stale Arcadia, and held their shattered hearts mutely and steadfastly together. True to her word with her parents, she gave him no warmer look or tone than any other, but no colder one neither; for her soul would not torment, but only suffer and obey. He made--he thought--all his looks and tones gentle, nor did the noble man avenge himself by a single manifestation of coldness, or in fact of any insincere making-of-friends with the princely female-recruiting-officer of crowns and hearts.

The Princess began to be unintelligible to him. They passed from the romantic to romance, then to the question, why it did not portray marriage. "Because," she replied, "it [romance] cannot be without love." "And marriage?" asked Albano, uncourteously. "Cannot exist without a friend," said she; "but Love is a god, nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus inciderit,"^[13] she added, for she had learned Latin for the sake of the poets.

Bouverot finished the verse, in order to make the sense ambiguous,--"Nec quarta loqui persona laboret."^[14] No one understood this last but the Lector and the Princess.

"Why are there no lamps in that house?" she inquired. "Who lives there?" She meant Spener's house. Liana answered only the latter question, and concluded her glowing picture with the words, "He lives for immortality." "What does he write?" inquired the Princess, misunderstanding her; and Liana must needs give a Christian explanation of the matter, whereupon the unbelieving woman smiled. There arose forthwith a dispute for and against the eternal sleep, which took up not much less time than they needed for making the circle of the thunder-house. The Princess began: "We should have quite as much to say against our every-day sleep, if it were not a fact, as against the eternal one." "More, too, however, against our ever waking out of it," said Albano, striking in, and cut short the religious disturbances.

The Princess came back again with her inquiries after Spener, who had interested her by his long mourning for her deceased father-in-law; and Liana, sure of her mother's concurrence, poured herself out into a stream of speech and emotion,--her eyes were forbidden to shed one,--on which was borne along a sublime image of her teacher. How the exaltation of this so delicate, tender soul thrilled her friend! So in the pale, small moon and evening star do higher mountains rear themselves than on our larger earth! "She was once inspired for thee, too, but now no more," said Albano to himself, and stayed behind after all the rest had gone on, because his soul had been long since full of pains, and because now the Princess began to displease him.

He posted himself alone, and looked at the ringing, gleaming war-dance of joy. The children ran illuminated through the uproar and in the bright green foliage. The tones hovered and hung twining together into one wreath, high in their ether above the noisy swarm of men, and sang down to them their heavenly songs. Only in me, said he to himself, do the tones and the lights toss a sea of agony to and fro, in no one else, in her not at all; she has brought with her for all others her old gladdening heart of love, not for me; she has not thus far suffered, she blooms in health. He considered not, however, that in fact his struggles also had shed not a drop of water into the dark red glow of his youth; in Liana well might wounds from such conflicts, like those of the scratched Aphrodite, only dye the white roses red.

But he determined to remain a man before so many eyes, and to await the crisis and Liana's solitude. He therefore exchanged several rational words with his foster relatives from Blumenbühl;--he said to Rabette: "It pleases you, does it not?" He startled, unintentionally, the Captain, who was hovering about some new faces from Haarhaar, with the unmeaning question, "Why dost thou leave my sister so alone?"

But as often as he looked at Liana, who to-day went in her long veil, as the only one without any thick, heavy gala-wrappage, as if she were a young, breathing, tender form among painted stone statues, so bashfully putting others to the blush, glistening and trembling like an egrette,--so often did masses of flame fly wildly to and fro within him. Passion, as the epilepsy often does with its victims, hurries us away, precisely at the dangerous crises of life, to shores and precipices. He leaned his head against a tree, slightly bowed down; then Charles came along out of his waltzes of joy, and asked him, with alarm, what provoked him so; for his bending down had cast gloomy, wild shadows upon his tense, muscular face; "Nothing," said he, and the face gleamed mildly when he lifted it up. At this moment, also, came the unreflecting Rabette, and would fain draw him into the general joy, and said, "Does anything ail thee?" "Thou!" he replied, and looked at her very indignantly.

"Go into the gloomy oak-grove to Gaspard's rock!" cried his heart. "Thy father never bowed; be his son!" Thereupon he strode away through the world of brilliancy; but when, far within, amidst the darkness, he leaned his head upon the rock, and the tones came toyingly and teasingly in after him, and he thought to himself, how he could have loved such a noble soul,--O how exceedingly!--then it was as if something said within him, "Now thou hast thy first sorrow on earth!"

As during an earthquake doors fly open and bells ring, so at the thought, "first sorrow," was his soul rent asunder, and hard tears dashed down. But he wondered at hearing himself weep, and indignantly wiped his face on the cool moss.

Weakened, not hardened, he stepped out into the enchanted land, besprinkled with glimmering jewels, and among the tones which came dancing more rapturously to meet him, and would fain snatch his soul away and lift it up and set it on high places, so that it might look down into far and wide spring-times of life! Here on this once blessed soil he saw lying the shattered, trampled pearl-string of his future days. "O how happy we might have been this evening!" thought he, and looked into the bright Feast of Tabernacles, into the gilded but living