But the old man, now more composed, went on to say that this new error gave him an occasion now earnestly to insist upon Linda's consent to a speedy union, because her father, perhaps himself the mysterious wonder-worker who had hitherto baffled all attempts at detection, had absolutely fixed, as the time of his appearance, the wedding-day. He indicated yet once more to his son his desire to know the way in which he had arrived at that hypothesis; but to no purpose: holy friendship could not be desecrated or deserted, and his breast closed mightily around his open heart, as the dark rock closes about the bright crystal. So he parted, warm and happy, from his silent father. In the hard hour of the letter-reading, he had only climbed an artificial, rocky region of life, and there lay the gay gardens again, stretching away even to the horizon; yet, after all, the vain, painful error of his Schoppe, and the thought of that spirit so desolated by love and hatred, which, even in the tone of the letter, seemed to bow itself down, and the prospect of his madness, passed like a distant funeral chime dolefully through his fair landscape, and the happy heart grew full and still. 124. CYCLE. Soon after this, Albano's kind sister again let a Hesperian hour strike and play on the musical clock of his happiness, whose keeper she was,--an hour with which his whole life, up and down, sounded in unison, and cleared away, and in which, as in Switzerland, when a cloud opens, all at once heights, glaciers, mountain-peaks, now look out from the sky. He saw his Linda again, but in new light, glowing, but like a rose before the blushing evening red. Her love was a soft, still flame, not a leaping of eccentric, stinging sparks. He concluded that his father, who was a man of his word, had already made his request to her for a priestly union, and even got her consent. Julienne told him she wished to speak with him the next evening, at six o'clock, in his father's chamber; that made him still more sure and glad. With new and still more tenderly adoring emotions, he parted with Linda: the goddess had become a saint.