Long did Albano wait for his friend on the following day; no one appeared, no man knew anything of him. On the second morning a report got wind that the Countess in the night, and Gaspard in the morning, had travelled off. "Has Schoppe driven both away by the truth?" he asked himself, forsaken and alone. In vain did he try to track Schoppe for several days after; not once had he been seen. "Thou, too, dear Schoppe!" said he, and shuddered at the barbarity of fate toward himself. As he thus surveyed himself, and looked out over the still, dark waste of his life, all at once it seemed to him as if his life suddenly lighted up, and a sun-glance fell upon the whole liquid mirror of the dark time which had elapsed. A voice, spake within him: "What has there been then? Men, dreams, blue days, black nights, have flown hither without me, without me flown away again, like the flitting summer, which the hand of man can neither weave nor hold fast. What is there left? A wide woe over the whole heart; but the heart, too, remains,--empty, of course, but firm, sound, hot. Loved ones are lost, not love itself; the blossoms are fallen, not the branches. Verily, I still wish; I still will; the past has not stolen from me the future. Arms I still have to embrace withal, and a hand to lay upon the sword, and an eye to survey the world. But what has gone down will come again, and flee again, and only that will remain true to thee which is forsaken,--thyself alone. Freedom is the glad eternity; calamity is for the slave the breaking out of a fire in the prison. No; I will _be_, not _have_. What! can the holy storm of tones only stir a particle of dust, while the rude, agitated air displaces mountains of ashes? Only where like tones and strings and hearts dwell, there do they move softly and invisibly. Only sound on, then, sacred string-music of the heart, but wish not to change anything in the rough, hard world, which owns and obeys only the winds, not tones." At this moment, he was found by the Lector Augusti, who brought, by word of mouth, instant entreaties from the Princesse Julienne to go with him to Gaspard's chamber, where she had the weightiest words to say to him about Schoppe. He complied readily; he expected, first and chiefly, to find with her a key to his Schoppe's covered fate; he saw, too, from the bold choice of a messenger, how important to his poor sister his appearance must be.