Albano observed her change. The charming melancholy of her once vigorous countenance, this reflection of her silent cloud, moved him to a sympathizing inquiry into her health and happiness. She answered him so confusedly and confoundingly,--sometimes even imputing to Albano, with all his sharp-sightedness, dissimulation and wickedness,--that she led him into the strangest error. Namely, under so great a certainty that some earth-shadow had passed across her whole life, and would not stir, he must needs seek the body which cast it,--which was, in his mind, Gaspard, whom she, as he imagined, still loved. He carried this presumption back very reasonably through all her earlier conversations and looks. It was so natural that they who were at an earlier period separated by a throne should now, in this lovely land of free connections, long for each other again. Beside all this, the Knight had, according to his inexorable irony, received her show of courting him with show on his part,--that is to say, with seriousness,--and therefore always served himself up as a side-dish to her enjoyment of his son, and carried over an after-winter into the spring. This double show Albano recalled to himself as double truth. Then, too, fate stepped in suddenly among his new conclusions. His father was taken dangerously sick of an unnerving spring-fever, caught from the sirocco-wind. "Take no special interest," said Gaspard to him, "either in my sufferings or expressions. I have, in such situations, a weakness which I am afterwards ashamed of, and yet cannot avoid." Albano was moved, by many an unexpected outbreak of the sick man's heart, even to the warmest love. If the ruins of a temple inspire melancholy, thought he, why shall not the ruins of a great soul affect me so still more? There are men full of colossal relics, like the earth itself. In their deep heart, already grown cold, lie fossil flowers of a fairer period; they resemble northern rocks, on which are found the impress of Indian flowers.