Thereupon he went to his travelling companion, the Princess, towards whom, indeed, his galling pride had not left behind one particle of flower-dust from his former love, who, however, in the smooth, cold mirror of his epic soul, in which all figures moved about freely and in clear conception, occupied, by virtue of her powerful individuality, the foreground, as a central figure. As he placed freedom, unity, even license of spirit, far above sickly pietism, hypocritical imitation of other people's talents and penitent warfare with one's self, he held the Princess, even with her cynicism of tongue, as "in her way dear and deserving." She inquired with much interest after his son's condition and prospect of travelling with them; he gave her, with his old calmness, the best hopes. The Princess Julienne was inaccessible. She had been compelled to see how the faithful playmate of her youth had been drawn by a harsh, hostile arm from the flowery shore into the flood of death, and how the poor girl had drifted away exhausted; this completely prostrated her, and gladly would she have plunged headlong after the victim. She had not been, the day before, in a condition to go with the two veiled ones to the castle. Gaspard now hastened to one of these, the Countess Romeiro, with whom he found the other also, the Princess Idoine. The latter had not been able to read so much in every letter about the sister of her face and soul, without travelling from her Arcadia in person to see her and prove the fair relationship; but when she arrived in her veil at the house of mourning, her kinswoman had already drawn hers over her dying eye; and when it arose, she saw herself extinguished, and beheld, in the deep mirror of time, her own dying image. She kept silence within herself, as if before God, but her heart, her whole life, was stirred. The resemblance was so striking that Julienne begged her never to appear before the afflicted mother. Idoine was, it is true, taller, more sharply cut and less rosy than Liana in her days of bloom; but the last pale hour, wherein the latter appeared beside her, made the whitened form taller and the face nobler, and withdrew the flowery veil of maidenhood from the sharp outline.