At night Albano put on his beautiful, serious character-mask, that of a knight-templar,--for a comic one his form, and almost his mood, was too great;--the latter was made still more solemn by this funeral dress of a whole murdered knightly order. After he had caused to be described to him once more the awful paths of Tartarus, and the burial-place of the Prince's heart, to avoid mistaking of the way in the night, he went forth, about ten o'clock, with a high-heaving bosom, which the night-larvæ[113] of fancy, together with friendship and love and the whole future, conspired to excite. 50. CYCLE. Albano stepped, for the first time, into the inverted puppet-world of a masquerade, as into a dancing realm of the dead. The black forms, the slit masks, the strange eyes, gleaming as out of night behind them, which, as in that mouldering Sultan in the coffin, alone remained alive,--the mingling and mimicking of all ranks, the flying and ring-running of the clinking dance, and his own solitude under the mask,--all this translated him, with his Shakespearian frame of spirit, into an enchanted and ghostly island full of juggleries, chimeras, and metamorphoses. Ah, this is the bloody scaffold, was his first thought, where the brother of thy Liana rent his young life, like a mourning-garment; and he looked fearfully round, as if he feared Roquairol might again attempt death. Among the masks he found no one under which he could suppose him to be; this meaningless cousinship of standing parts, footmen, butchers, Moors, ancestors, &c.,--these could not conceal any loved one of Albano's. Lonesomely and inquisitively he paced up and down behind the rows of the Anglaise; and more than ten eyes, which glistened opposite in the annular eclipse of the lace mask,--for women, from their open-heartedness, do not love masks, but are fond of showing themselves,--followed the powerfully and pliantly built form, which, with the bold helm and plume, with the crossed white mantle and the gleaming mail on his breast, seemed to bring a knight out of the heroic age. At last a masked lady, who was chatting between unmasked ones, came up to him with long steps and large feet, and boldly grasped his hand as if for a dance. He was extremely embarrassed at the boldness of the summons, and about the choice of an answer; it is valor precisely that loves to marry itself to gallantry, as the Damascene blade, besides hardness, possesses a perpetual fragrance; but the lady only wrote in his hand his initials, with the interrogation-mark after them,--"_v. C.?_" and after the Yes, the charming one said, softly, "Do you not remember me? the master of exercises, Von Falterle?" Albano testified, notwithstanding his dislike of the part, a real joy at finding again a companion of his youth. He asked which mask was Captain Roquairol; Falterle assured him he had not yet arrived.