At last the physician resolved to mix at once a sleeping potion in his drink. Albano allowed it. Schoppe got it; glowed and phantasied for a space of some minutes; at last the mist of sleep came up and soon covered the patient over. Albano, then, after so long a time, visited again the green of the earth and the blue of heaven, and his Dian in Lilar. What a transformation had taken place in the interval; how had things been confounded, and changed places, with each other! How many leaves had become budgeons again! And many a foam of life which had once gladdened him with its whiteness and delicacy and lightsomeness, now chilled his bosom like gray, heavy water, and he had retained almost nothing except his courage to meet life. At Dian's he heard of new changes, of the Prince's approaching death, of Idoine's approaching visit to her sister in anticipation of the bereavement. In what a strange bewilderment did his soul open its eyes out of its winter-sleep into the warm sunshine which this image of Liana diffused over his life! In many a still night by Schoppe's ghostly tent had he already, since Julienne for the first time let him see the apparition of this peace-angel without the veil, beheld the olden time and former love come up again like a heaven of distant stars, and in the clear-obscure of dreams disrobed of sleep he saw on the sea of time a far, far-off island,--whether behind him or before him, he knew not,--where a white, averted form, resembling or suggesting Liana's, hovered and sang as an echo of the olden strain. Now close upon the death-month of the brother followed the death-month of the sister Liana. Were it possible that the celestial one would step out again from the still mirror of the second world and out of its immeasurable distances, into this earthly atmosphere, and after her transfiguration again walk embodied here below? But friendship demanded room for its sorrows, and these cloud-images were soon covered over or destroyed by it. He could not find courage in his heart, however much he wished it, to demand of Schoppe, or even to receive from him, a description of that healing-night, in which Idoine had been Liana; and yet this form was the only live-playing jewel in the death-ring on the skeleton of stern time, which stood before him. What days! What the graves had not stolen from him and swallowed up, the earth had snatched away, and Gaspard, once his exalted father on a serene throne of the heavens, had now appeared to his fancy with frightful hell-powers and weapons down below, sitting on a throne of the abyss.