In Tartarus all the apparatus of horror seemed to him now very diminutive and ridiculous. Just then, not far from the Catacomb avenue, Roquairol and Rabette came to meet him. Roquairol's flaming face was extinguished and Rabette's turned backward, when Albano passionately strode forth to meet them, and, still more imbittered by the remembrance of the time when their heavens were contemporaneous, and flaming up under the wind which blew upon his glowing ruins, attacked the Captain with: "Art thou a friend? Art thou no devil? Thou hast referred me to this evening: never, never say a word more of it!" Both trembled, confused and colorless; Albano, without further reflection, ascribed the growing pale and turning away to their sympathy for his martyrdom. What a confounding, hostile night! He roved onward and onward, the licking fire of the joy and music that pursued him tormented him unspeakably,--the tones were to him mocking tropical birds of fairer, warmer zones that came fluttering to meet him. "I will just go to my bed, so soon as it once becomes still within there!" He was half a mile off, when the music of Lilar still continued to sound after him; he sternly stopped his ears, but Lilar still sounded on within them,--then he perceived that he was only listening to himself. But all the time it seemed to him as if the merry ringing must, as in _Don Juan_, resolve itself into a cry of murder at the presence of ghosts. The avenue of coming days ran to a frightful point before him, when he now snatched out from them the moon of his heaven, which had once gleamed upon his childish heart and upon the paths of Blumenbühl. The blooming, dancing genius of his past, all unseen, with only the wreath of joy in its hand, stole away behind him, while he struggled with the dark angel of futurity going before him, who dragged him along after him through sounding thickets,--through sleepy villages,--through moist, trickling valleys. At last Albano looked up to heaven, beneath the innumerable eternal stars, to the hanging blossom-garden of God. "I am not ashamed before you," said he, "because I weep on this ball, and am oppressed before your immensity. Up there ye stand, all of you, far asunder,--and on all great worlds every poor spirit has, after all, only one little spot beneath its feet where it is happy or miserable. When only this night has once gone by, and I am gone to my bed; to-morrow I shall certainly be a man and stand fast!"