not love me, then?" "Dear Alban," replied the father, "one cannot answer thee enough: thou art very good,--it is very good." But with the pride of a love which boldly measured itself with his father's, he seized firmly the hand with the mask, and looked on the Knight with fiery eyes. "My son," replied the weary one, "I have yet much to say to thee to-day, and little time, because I travel to-morrow,--and I know not how long the beating of my heart will let me speak." Ah, then, that previous sign of a touched soul had been only the sign of a disordered pulse. Thou poor son, how must thy swollen sea stiffen before this sharp air,--ah, how must thy warm heart cleave to the ice-cold metal, and tear itself away not without a skin-peeling wound! But, good youth! who of us could blame thee that wounds should attach thee as it were by a tie of _blood_ to thy true or false demigod,--although a demigod is oftener joined to a demi-beast than a demi-man,--and that thou shouldst so painfully love! Ah, what ardent soul has not once uttered the prayer of love in vain, and then, lamed by the chilling poison, like other poisoned victims, not been able any longer to move its heavy tongue and heavy heart! But love on, thou warm soul! like spring-flowers, like night-butterflies, tender love at last breaks through the hard-frozen soil, and every heart, which desires nothing else than a heart, finds at last its bosom! 5. CYCLE. The Knight took him up to a gallery supported by a row of stone pillars, which lemon-trees strewed all over with perfumes and with little, lively shadows, silver-edged by the moon. He drew two medallions from his pocket-book,--one represented a remarkably youthful-looking female face, with the circumscription, "Nous ne nous verrons jamais, mon fils." "Here is thy mother," said Gaspard, giving it to him, "and here thy sister"; and handed him the second, whose lines ran into an indistinct, antiquated shape, with the circumscription, "Nous nous verrons un jour, mon frère." He now began his discourse, which he delivered in such a low tone and in so many loose sheets (one comma often coming at one end of the gallery and the next at the other), and with such an alternation of quick and slow paces, that the ear of any eavesdropping inquisitor keeping step with them, under the gallery, had there been one down there, could not have caught three drops of connected sound. "Thy attention, dear Alban," he continued, "not thy fancy, must now be put on the stretch. Thou art, unhappily, to-day too romantic for one who is to hear so many romantic things. The Countess of Cesara ever loved the mysterious; thou wilt perceive it in the commission which she gave me a few days before her death, and which I was obliged to promise I would execute this very Good-Friday."