"Do I, too, distress you?" said he, in the highest emotion. With the tone of the virgin who lay beneath the flowers, Idoine innocently said, "I only weep that I am not Liana." Quickly she added, "Ah, this place is so holy, and yet the human heart is not enough so." He understood not her self-reproach. Reverence and openheartedness and inspiration mastered him; life stood up and stood out shining from the narrow bounds of troublous reality, as out of a coffin; heaven came down nearer with its lofty stars, and the two stood in the midst of them. "Noble Princess," said he, "we have neither of us any apology to make here; the holy spot, like a second world, takes away all sense of mutual strangeness. Idoine, I know that you once gave me peace; and, before the hidden tabernacle of the spirit in whose sense you spoke, I here thank you." Idoine answered, "I did it without knowing you, and therefore I could allow myself the short use or abuse of a fleeting resemblance. Had it depended upon me, I certainly never would have so painfully awakened your recollections with so insignificant a resemblance as an external one is. But her heart deserves your remembrance and your sorrow. They wrote me you were no longer in the linden city." She sought now to hasten her departure. "In a few days," he answered, "I, too, shall travel. I seek comfort in war from the peace of the grave, and the solitude which makes my life still." "Earnest activity, believe me, always reconciles one with life at last," said Idoine; but the tranquil words were borne by a trembling voice, for, by help of her sister, she had got a sight of the whole gray, rainy land of his present existence, and her heart was full of deep sympathy for her kind. Here he looked at her sharply; her nun-like eyelids, which always, during her speaking, drooped over the whole of her large eyes, made her so like a slumbering saint. He was reminded by her last words of her beneficent life in Arcadia, where the gay flower-dust of her ideas and dreams, unlike the heavy, dead gold-dust of mere riches, lightly fluttering round in cheerful life, enlivening all with unobserved influence, at length displayed its fruit in firm woods and gardens on the earth. Everything within him loved her, and cried, "She only could be thy last as well as thy first love"; and his whole heart, opened by wounds, was unfolded to the still soul. But a serious, severe spirit closed it again: "Unhappy one, love no one again; for a dark, destroying angel goes behind thy love with a sword, and whatever rosy lip thou pressest to thine he touches with the sharp edge or poisoned point, and it withers or bleeds to death!"