The Captain came running down from the Italian roof, and announced that the Cereus would bloom this evening at ten o'clock, the gardener said, and he should stay there. "And thou too," he said to Albano. All that the double limitations of forbearing tenderness toward sister and friend would allow he lovingly set at stake, for the sake of pleasing the latter. Liana herself begged him to wait for the blooming; she was so delighted to find it was so near! Her soul hung upon flowers, like bees and dew. Already had her friend, the pious Spener, who fixed an enraptured eye upon these living arabesques of God's throne, made her a friend to these mute, ever-sleeping children of the Infinite; but still more had her own maidenly and her suffering heart done it. Have you never met tender, female souls, into whose blossoming time fate had thrown cold clouds, and who now, like Rousseau, sought other flowers than those of joy, and who wearied themselves with stooping, in valleys and on rocks, to gather and to forget, and to fly from the dead _Pomona_ to the young _Flora_? The thorough-bass and Latin, wherewith _Hermes_ proposes to divert maidens, must yield here to the broad, variegated hieroglyphics of Nature, the rich study of Botany. A nameless tenderness for Liana came into Albano's soul at the little four-seated supper-table; it seemed to him as if he were now nearer to her, and a relative; and yet he comprehended not his kinswoman, when, from every serious mood into which her mother sank, she strove to win her back with pleasantries. Out of doors the nightingales were calling man into the lovely night; and no one pined more to be abroad than he. For the soul's eyes, the _blue_ of heaven is what the _green_ of earth is to the bodily eyes, namely, an inward strengthening. When Zesara, at length, came free and clear out of the fetters of the room,--out of this spiritual house-arrest into the free realm of heaven, and beneath all the stars and on the magic Olympus of statues, at which he had so often longingly looked up,--then did his forcibly contracted breast elastically expand: how the constellations of life moved to meet each other in brighter forms; how did spring and night sit enthroned! The old gardener, who, simply from a grateful attachment to "the good-souled, condescending Fräulein," had, with rare pains, forced these early blossoms from the _Cereus serpens_, stood up there already, apparently as an observer of the flowers, but in fact as an expectant of the greatest praise, with a brown, indented, pitted, and serious face, which did not challenge praise with a single smile. Liana thanked the gardener before she came to the blossoms; then she praised them and his pains. The old man merely waited for every other one of the company to be astonished also; then he went drowsily off to bed, with a firm faith that Liana would to-morrow remember him in such a way as to make him contented.