She answered, with emotion, "O thou good, pure spirit! thou hast never distressed me, thou hast ever comforted, guided, made me happy and holy,--a phantom is it, Albano? It even preserves me against all phantoms of terror, against all ghostly fear, because it is always about me. Why, if it is only a phantom, does it never appear to me in my dreams?[176] Why comes it not when I will? But it comes only in weighty cases; then I consult and obey it very willingly. It has already to-day, Albano," she added, in a lower and fainter tone, "twice appeared to me on the way, when I heard the inner music, and previously in the thunder-house, when the sun went down, and has affectionately answered me." "And what says it, heavenly one?" asked Albano, innocently. "I saw it only on the way, and asked no question," replied the childlike one, blushing; and here, all at once, her holy soul stood unconsciously without a veil before him; for she had, in the thunder-house, received from the invisible Caroline the yes to her love; because that being was her own creation, and this a suggestion of her own. Yes indeed, heavenly one! thou standest before the mirror with the virgin's veil over thy form, and when thy image softly raises its own, thou fanciest thyself still covered! No word can express Albano's veneration for such a sanctified heart, which dreamed into such distinctness glorified beings; whose golden flowers only grew the higher over the thought of death, as earthly ones do in churchyards over the reality; which, simultaneously with his own, invisible hands had drawn into two similar dreams;[177] to which one was ashamed to give common truths for its holy errors. "Thou art from heaven," he said, inspired, and his joy became the pearl melted in the eye which quenches the thirst of the human heart; "therefore thou wouldst go back thither!" "O, I consecrate to thee, my friend," said she, smilingly weeping, and pressed his hand to her pure heart, "the whole little life which I have, every hour to the last, and I will, meanwhile, prepare thee for everything which God sends."