All at once single flute-tones floated up overhead on the mountains and out of the bowers,--more and more continually joined them,--they quivered through each other in a beautiful confusion,--at last flute-choirs broke forth mightily on all sides, like angels, and soared toward heaven;--they proclaimed how sweet is spring, and how joy weeps, and how our heart longs, and then vanished overhead in the blue spring,--and the nightingales flew up from the cool flowers and alighted on the bright tree-tops, and cried joyfully into the triumphal songs of May,--and the fanning of the morning-breeze swayed the lofty, glimmering rainbows to and fro, and threw them far into the flowers. Liana's work sank out of her hands into her lap, and, in a way peculiar to herself, while she leaned her head forward like a Muse, she cast her eye upward, fixing it upon a dreamy distance; her blue eye glimmered as the blue cloudless ether overflows with soft lightning in the tepid summer-night;--but the youth's spirit blazed up in its emotion, like the sea in a storm. She drew down the black veil,--certainly not against sun and air alone; and Albano, with an inner world pictured on his agitated form, played--a sublime contrast to himself--with the ringlets of the little Helena, whom he had drawn towards him, and looked, with big tears, into her simple, little face, which understood him not. At this moment the mother came hastening over into the silence, and asked, in a very friendly manner, how he liked it all. His other ecstasies resolved themselves into a commendation of the tones; and the dear Greek herself extolled what she had often heard, more and more strongly, as if it were new to her, and listened most intently with him. A maiden with the harp looked in through the entering-thicket of the vale, and Liana saw the sign, and rose up. As she was on the point of raising her veil and departing, the great-hearted youth bethought him of his confession: "I have read your to-day's letter,--by heaven, I must say it now!" said he. She drew the veil no higher, and said, with trembling voice, "You surely have not read it! you could not have been in my chamber?" and looked at Chariton. He replied, he had not read it all, but yet a good deal of it; and related in three words a much milder history than Liana could have hoped. "The naughty Pollux!" Chariton kept saying. "O God, forgive me, I pray you, this sin of ignorance!" said Albano. She threw back the dark veil for a second, and said, with heightened color and downcast look, appeased, perhaps, by her joy at the agreeable disappointment of her worse expectation: "It belonged merely to a female friend; and you will perhaps, if I ask you, not read anything again." And during the fall of the veil her eye looked up soothingly and forgivingly, and with her beloved she slowly departed from him.