Gaspard parted from him very warmly, with the words, "Albano, I am very well satisfied with thee; I should be infinitely so if the purity of the youth had passed over into the man; I have not yet found it so." Albano was about to affirm and swear with emotion. "That is why," he continued, waving away the oath with a light motion of the hand, "thou foundest me so glad about thy good fortune, for the Princess's friend had already announced to me thy love in the morning. Take heed to thyself before her, for she hates thee without bounds." With a hard and horrible aspect, like a new and extraordinary beast of prey behind the grating, does a real though unarmed hatred present itself for the first time before a good heart. Albano demanded no confirmation or explanation of this sad intelligence, for the love and error of the Princess, her acquaintance with his former coldness toward Linda, her silent bitterness toward Linda herself, were quite flames enough for her to cook the strongest poison by. He took up his residence again, at the request of his father, at the house of Doctor Sphex, situated, unmeaningly to him, down in the valley; and Gaspard resumed his abode in the palace, near his sick friend. The Knight speedily presented him to the court, which soon observed and remarked the brown of travel, the sharper lightning of the eye, and the whole latest development of his great form. The Princess received him with the lightest, finest coldness, a sort of _aqua toffana_, which seems only pure, tasteless water. The Prince sat upright in his sick-bed, with peevish face, before drawings of Herculaneum, and was letting himself be informed on the subject by Bouverot. As a face upon which, in the late, gray years of life, fair joyousness can still picture itself, announces a fair life and fair heart, so the saint never wears a more heavenly smile than on his sick-bed, nor the reprobate a more hard and painful one. Albano turned his eye away from the sickly, withered _brother of his sister_. Languishing, he looked back toward the past Hesperia, and forward to the gate of paradise which was finally to open, and show Linda and his sister in Eden. "It will certainly meet your approval," Gaspard had said, "that, under the pretext of Luigi's sickness, I have had them both quartered in the old palace at Lilar, where thou canst see them more unobserved." He met the Minister Froulay, and the Lector came to meet him; with both came a dark, manifold shadowy retinue of hard, old recollections. He had not yet seen Captain Roquairol, who was now to him the evening cloud of a sunken spring day. He carried as speedily as he could his dumb heart--which was an Æolian-harp in a dead calm--to his childhood's Blumenbühl, to greet the parental beings, and to read the papers of his soul's nearest neighbor, Schoppe, for whose promised return he now longed more than ever. 121. CYCLE.