Albano fancied, with these Dithyrambics, his weeping soul would be quite sung to sleep, and he only gave it in addition a gentle rocking. Meanwhile, although he would not have confessed it, his young rosy cheeks grew as pale as a forehead, and his face fell in like a piano-forte key upon the snapping of a string. It was touching and hard at once, when he sat laughing among his friends and their friends with a colorless face,--with higher, sharper bones of eyes and nose,--with a wilder eye, which blazed out of a darker socket. From music, especially Roquairol's, wherein under the hackneyed, artistical alternation of damper and thunder, the passionate rolling and plunging of our ship were too vividly represented, his ear and heart fled as from a destroying siren. The broken-off lance-splinter of the wound rankled and festered in his whole being. O, as, in the years of childhood, when the rosy cloud in heaven seemed to him to lie directly on the mountain where it was so easy to be reached, the magnificent pile retired far into the sky so soon as he had climbed the mountain, so now did the aurora of life and the spirit, which he would fain seize and hold near to him, stand so high and far overhead beyond his reach in the blue! Painfully does man attain the alp of ideal love; still more painful and dangerous--as in the case of other alps--is the descent from it. One day Chariton came into town, merely to hand him at last a letter of her husband's,--for Dian, like all artists, much more easily and agreeably executed a work of art than a letter,--wherein he expressed his joy that he should see Albano so soon. "Is he coming back, then?" asked the Count. She exclaimed, with a sad tone: "Body o' me!--that indeed!--according to his former letter he has still to stay his year longer." "I do not understand him so," said Albano. The same evening he was invited by the Princess to see the engravings of Herculaneum, which had come by the same post with Chariton's letter. She welcomed him with that animated look of love which we put on before one who will immediately, as we hope, pour out before us the unmeasured thanks of his heart. But he had nothing to pour out from his. She asked at length, somewhat surprised, whether he had received no letters to-day from Spain. She forgot that the post is courteous and expeditious toward no house except the princely house. As, however, his letter must certainly be already lying in his chamber, she allowed herself to take upon herself the part of Time, who brings all things to daylight, and told what was in the letter, namely, "that she should in autumn undertake a little artistic journey to Rome, upon which his father would accompany her, and he him if he liked; that was the whole secret." It was only the half; for she soon added, that she should be most glad to extend the pleasure of this tour to the best draughtsman in the city, as soon as she recovered,--Liana.