At times a pang came to her when she thought that she should perhaps never see her precious parents, especially her mother, any more; then it seemed to her as if she were herself invisible and already making her pilgrimage alone down the deep, dark avenue to the next world and heard her friends and companions at the gate far behind calling after her. Then she tenderly sent her love over, as if out of death, and rejoiced in the great reunion. Spener visited his pupil daily; his manly voice, full of strengthening and solace, was, in her darkness, the evening-prayer-bell, which leads the traveller out of the dusky thicket back to the more cheerful lights. Thus was her holy heart drawn up to still greater heights of holiness, and the dark passion-flowers of her sorrows shut themselves up to sleep in the tepid night of blindness. How different are the sufferings of the sinner and those of the saint! The former are an eclipse of the moon, by which the dark night becomes still blacker and wilder; the latter are a solar eclipse, which cools off the hot day, and casts a romantic shade, and wherein the nightingales begin to warble. In this way Liana maintained, in the midst of the sighs of others around her, and in the tempestuous weather that enveloped her, a tranquil, healing bosom. So does the tender white cloud often in the beginning hurry away, a torn and tattered fugitive through the heavens, but at last move along in rounded form and slow pace overhead there, when down below the storm still sweeps over the earth, and whirls and tears everything. But, good Liana, all the thirty-two winds, let them waft pleasant days to thee or blow them away, hold on longer than the dead calm of repose! 85. CYCLE. The Minister, when she came home from Lilar with murdered eyes, had set in _his_ right eye a hell, and into his left a purgatory, for no fatality had ever before so cheated him, namely, so completely upset all his projects and prospects,--the office of court-dame for his daughter, that ring guard on the finger of the Princess, and finally every chance of a haul with his double-woven net.