The first solitary minute which Albano found with his sister he devoted to an inquiry about her Latin intelligence that Linda's father would appear precisely on her marriage-day; but she referred him to his own father, who could tell him all about Linda's, and begged him "to indulge Linda, not only in her tenderness, but also in her characteristic shyness of marriage, which went very far. She could not, upon one occasion, accompany a female friend to the nuptial altar," Julienne added; "she called it the place of execution of woman's liberty, the funeral pile of the fairest, freest love, and said the heroic poem of love became then, at the highest, the pastoral poem of marriage. Of course she knows not whither such principles ultimately lead." "I hope, too, that thou trustest her," said Albano, making other and higher deductions from this singularity than his strict sister. She suddenly broke off, to impart to him a piece of advice which he was to take with him to Pestitz,--namely, to shun the Princess, who was, to the very core, cold, false, revengeful, and selfish. "She has something in view with thee, and, indeed, much; and her hatred toward the Countess must now be added. Linda clearly apprehends her, but yet she lets herself, out of passionateness, be carried away and made use of by all whom she foresees and surveys." Albano adhered to his old, milder judgment of the Princess,--so much the more, as he already knew Julienne's moral severity towards every woman of genius, from her misjudgment in the case of Liana,--but he readily gave her his word to shun the Princess, without telling her the reason,--namely, the love which the woman had for him, and of which it was so hard to disenchant her. To his tender feelings, there was no greater rudeness than this public breaking open and reading of a love-letter, this masculine catching and proclaiming of a woman's sigh of love through a speaking-trumpet for the people.