When Albano had heard his sister out, he said, with a soft voice of emotion: "Make peace with the past; man cannot assail it. Leave to the great unhappy one the night into which she of herself has been drawn. But why were you so eager to have me with you? Particularly if thou knowest aught of my Schoppe, I entreat thee to impart it." "I will answer thee," said she, weeping and wondering; "but, brother, assure me that thy silence is not again the curtain of a new misfortune. I recognize you men by that, one must hate you all, and I do so, too." "I have nothing sad in my mind; before God I affirm it. You women, you who will only quench your hell with tears, and kindle it with the breath of sighs, comprehend not, that often a single hour's thinking can give a man a staff or wings, which shall lift him at once out of hell, and then it may burn on for all him." "Show me, then," said she, in a tearfully comic manner, "_thy_ wing." "This," replied he, "that I build not upon man, but upon God in me and above me. The foreign ivy winds around us, runs up on us, stands as a second summit beside ours, and it is thereby withered. Spirits should grow beside each other, not upon each other. We should, like God, as imperishable ones, love the perishable." "Very good," said she, "if it only insures thee peace. As touching thy poor Schoppe, he has been thrust into the madhouse by way of punishment; but first let me give you a regular account. He dressed up a story about a second sister of thine before thy already so much excited father. One could have let this new distraction of intellect pass; but thy uncle was called, who told him to his face he had murdered the Baldhead; and the choice was haughtily left him between imprisonment and the madhouse; so he betook himself to the latter. Stay, stay! The weightiest is to come. Whatever I may think of him, I see he is thy honest friend; and to speak out freely, even Linda, before her departure, inserted in her last letter to me an intercession for him. He not only made the farcical journey to Spain for thee, he also effected thy cure; perhaps thou owest him thy life. I wonder that I, or somebody or other, has never before mentioned it to thee." She began now upon Idoine's sound and generous character, her Arcadia, and the last day she had spent with her and looked into her clear soul. She passed on to his bed of fever and his mourning beside Liana's bier, and old Schoppe's talks and runnings to and fro, and his noble victory, when he had brought at length the glorified Liana, in Idoine's form, before his eye, that she might pronounce the healing words: "Have peace!"