It was a good, gentle spirit, or Liana's own,--that spirit which conducts man by the gradual transition of twilight over into night, which pours soothing tears into sorrow and into ecstasy, and which suffers not the short path of love's evening star to be overcast with clouds,--this spirit it was which saved their tongues and ears from the terrible sound which would at once have torn up the golden magic circle of evening into an all-surrounding blaze of hell. "Who is that coming so hastily yonder?" said Linda. "My foe," said Albano. Roquairol had missed him, and had heard of Linda's arrival; in the hell-torment of anxiety, lest what had happened the night before might reveal itself before them this evening, he hurried, under the pretext of going to get Dian as a performer and Albano as a hearer, up the mountain. Like a centaur, half man, half wild beast, he broke in upon the melodious souls and joys with the hollow, confused war of his whole being. But hardly had he perceived in their looks the consecration of rapture, and seen that the black curtain still lay fast upon his murder, when the grim spirit of jealousy reared itself within him. "She is now my betrothed," he said to himself; and the solar eclipse of confused repentance was eclipsed by the tempest of chagrin. Linda, kindling into anger from an inward shudder at his similarity of voice, stood before him like a diamond, clear, sparkling, hard and cutting; but Albano, amidst the echoes of the harmony, stood gently on the churchyard of the sister of this brother, and not without some confusion. Roquairol was haunted again by yesterday's unclean suspicion, that perhaps Albano and Linda were no longer innocent. Angrily, he now invited Linda to make one of the spectators at his tragedy. "You told me," said she to Albano, "it concluded so tragically; I am no friend of that." "He is not at all acquainted with it," said Roquairol. "No," said Albano. As the serpent looked down upon the paradise of the first pair, so looked he with the pleasing consciousness that he could hand them the apple from the tree of knowledge which should immediately drive them out from theirs. "Besides," she subjoined, "I see badly in the evening, or not at all." Roquairol affected to be surprised at that, joked upon the gain which it would be to him as first lover in the play, if she only _heard_ him, and begged Dian to unite in entreating her. Not inborn, but acquired coldness, has at command the highest falsehood; the former is capable only of dissimulation, the latter of simulation also, because it at once knows and uses all ways and means of kindling a fire, and keeps its firm standing on slippery ice by the ashes of former heat. When Albano himself at length advised her to take part in the tragic enjoyment, and grant her friends of both sexes below there the fair, pure enjoyment of her presence, then she consented, not without wondering at his retraction.