We will now leave the prætor and Dosch to entertain their guests in the courts and colonnades, while in reversion we complete our description of the garden tableau. After the prætor’s departure with his guests, Luocuratia, unmindful of aught else, gazed through her flowing veil of hair upon the face of M. Hollydorf, with the wondering daze of the fawn when surprised in its leafy covert by the gentle presence of woman. With one arm still encircling her sister’s neck, yet seemingly unconscious of her presence, she was recalled to herself, from the dreamy maze of her vision, by the voice of her mother. Then she asked with fluttering hesitation, “What is it?” Correliana caressingly removed the arm from her neck, then gathering her sister’s flowing hair from her brow, bore it back from her face, and while her mother bound it with a silicoth fillet, whisperingly, with the prelude of a kiss, replied, “It is yourself, Luocuratia, be calm, and to-night you shall know.” M. Hollydorf, who had attended Correliana like a doomed shadow, from the day they left the _Tortuga_, thinking and acting from her prompting, even in matters pertaining to his professional avocations, had with the first glance that he caught of her sister’s face, stood like one transfixed, his eyes alternating from one to the other, until the attraction of Luocuratia’s involved his own. Placing Luocuratia in her mother’s charge, Correliana took M. Hollydorf’s hand and directed him to a vine-covered alcove in the lower garden walk. When seated, she said, “We are so thankful, for we are now saved from the inherent misery that broods like a pall over your people. You will now be happy, but not yourself again! If I should allow you to recover from the amazement of your surprise, without an explanation, you might think me lacking in truthful sympathy, which we hold, under direction, as the privileged source of our affection. Advised, from the first, of the instability of instinctive ‘love’ founded upon personal attractions, which is the ruling incentive for marriage with your race, I withheld from you a knowledge of my sister’s existence, and our twin resemblance, that her affections might not be invoked with peril; for as you have felt, we are endowed with the censorial essentials of perception in premonition of cause and effect. The long delayed visit to our schools was deferred, for the proof of your susceptibility to our current flow, and constancy in affection; and we are happy in being able to feel the assurance that the transfer of your allegiance to her keeping will be free from regretful reflection. Notwithstanding the long endurance to which you have been subjected, and the severity of the trial for the cure of your self-imposed humiliation, the result not only compensates for your suffering, but confirms the wisdom of the judgment that prompted the restraint, by enhancing the zest with the security of a happy fruition.