Idoine said little to the Knight, and only looked on and saw how her friend Linda overflowed with real childlike love in return for his almost paternal affection. Both maidens he treated with a respectful, warm, and tender morality, which must have appeared wonderful to an eye (for example, the Prince's) which had often witnessed the unmerciful irony wherewith he so loved to draw downward in a slow spiral of licentious discourses, rotten, worm-eaten hearts,--half installed in God's church and half in the Devil's chapel,--shy, soft, sensitive sinners, inwardly-bottomless Fantasts, the Roquairols, for instance, more and more deeply and with ever-increasing pleasure to the centre of infamy. The Prince thought, in such cases, "He thinks exactly as I do;" but Gaspard did with him just so. Even the trembling, pale Julienne stole in, at last, to see him. They avoided, so far as they could, for her sake, the open grave of her friend; but she asked, herself, after the sick lover of that friend very urgently. The Knight, who for most answers of moment had provided himself with an original phrase-book of nothings, particularly with ice-flowers of speech, such as, "It is going on as well as can be expected under the circumstances," or, "Such things are to be looked for," or, "It will all come right," made use on this occasion of the last-named flower of rhetoric, and replied, "It will all come right." When he reached home, nothing had come right, but the flood of the evil was at its highest. There lay the youth--dressed, in bed,--unable to walk any longer,--in a burning heat,--talking wildly,--and yet at every stroke of the clock uttering his old prayer to the high, shut-up heavens. Hitherto his firm, vigorous brain had been able to hold fast its reason, at least for all that did not touch Liana; but gradually the whole mass went over into the fermentation of the fever. In vain did his father, once, when he knelt and prayed for the apparition of the dead, arm himself with all the wrath and thunder of his personality. "Give me peace!" Albano continued to pray, softly, and, as he said it, looked him softly in the face.