The exotic beads of nectar-fragrance which hung in five white calyxes, crowned as it were with brown leaf-work, seized the fancy. The odors from the spring of a hotter clime drew it away into remote dreams. Liana only stroked with a soft finger, as one glides over eyelids, the little incense-vases, without touching with predatory hand the full little garden of tender stamina which crowded together in the cup. "How lovely, how very tender!" said she, with childlike happiness. "What a cluster of five little evening stars! Why come they only by night,--the dear, shy little flowers?" Charles seemed to be on the point of breaking one. "O let it live!" she begged; "to-morrow they will all have died of themselves. Charles! thus does so much else fade," she added, in a lower tone. "Everything!" said he, sharply. But the mother, against Liana's will, had heard it. "Such death-thoughts," said she, "I love not in youth; they lame its wings." "And then," replied Liana, with a maiden-like turning of the tables, "it just stays with us, that's all, like the crane in Kleist's fable, whose wings they broke, so that he could not travel with the rest into the warm land." This gay, motley veil of deep earnestness was not transparent enough for our friend. But by and by the good maiden took pains to look just as the careful mother wished. The benumbing lily which the earth wears on her breast, the moon; and the whole dazzling Pantheon of the starry heavens; and the city, with its pierced-work of night-lights; and the high, majestic, dark avenues; and on meadows and brooks the milk-white lunar-silver, wherewith the earth spun itself into an evening-star; and the nightingales singing out of distant gardens;--did not all this stir omnipotently every heart, till it would fain confess with tears its longing? And the softest heart of all which beat at this moment below the stars, could it have succeeded in wholly veiling itself? Almost! She had accustomed herself, before her mother, to dry away with her eye, so to speak, the tear, before it grew big enough to fall.