The little fellow ran up stairs and down again, remained a long time before the door, and came in with Liana by the hand, who was dressed in white, with a black veil. She looked in and around a little perplexed, as she with both hands pushed back the veil from her friendly face; but she heard Chariton's lullaby. She did not know him till he spoke; and then her whole beautiful being reddened like an illuminated landscape after an evening shower: she had the pleasure, she said, of knowing his father. Probably she knew the son still better by Julienne's and Augusti's pictures, and on more congenial sides; her sisterly heart was certainly moved, too, by his brotherly voice; for the charm, and even preferableness, of resemblance and copy is so great, that one who looks like even an indifferent person becomes more dear to us, like the echo of an empty sound, merely because, in this case as in the imitative art, the past and absent, shining through the fancy, become a present. The gradually lowering tone of the mother's lullaby announced the sinking of the infant to slumber, and at last the diminuendo died away, and Chariton, with glistening eyes, ran to take Liana's hand. A frank and serene friendship bloomed between the innocent hearts, and held them entwined, as the vine does the neighboring poplars. Chariton related to her what Albano had related, with a reliance upon her most fervent sympathy. Liana listened to her friend with eager attention; but that was quite as much as if she were looking at the historical source itself that was so near at hand. 44. CYCLE. At last they began a journey through the garden. Pollux very reluctantly, and only after Liana's promise to draw him a horse again to-day, stayed behind as patron-saint of the cradle. Alban said, to the extreme joy of the Architect's wife, who could now show the beautiful man everything, that he had seen but little of Lilar yet. How bewitchingly the two forms, linked in friendship, walked before him side by side! Chariton, although a matron, yet of a Grecian slenderness, fluttered along as a younger sister beside the lily-form of her somewhat taller Liana. The former seemed, according to the classification of the landscape-painters, nature in motion; Liana, nature in repose. As he joined Liana again, by whose left hand Helena was running along,--the mother on the right,--he found her softly-descending profile indescribably touching, and around the mouth he recognized lines which sorrow had drawn, the scars of returning days; while the lovely maiden, on the sunny side of the front face, as in her easy conversation, manifested a free, benignant cheerfulness, which Albano, who had never knocked at the school-room door of any young ladies' academy, found it hard to reconcile with her tearful poetry. O, if the tear of woman passes away lightly, so flutters away still more lightly woman's smile; and the latter, still oftener than the former, is only appearance!