The chambermaid had to make profession with the vow of silence, which she kept as strictly as she could, but not more so. Next morning very few alighted before their own doors, most before the doors of others, in order to land the news together with the injunction of the Princess not to make the thing _éclatant_, because in that case the Prince would hear of it. If ever the nobility of Pestitz was happy _en masse_, it was this very morning. Nothing was wanting to universal joy but a chambermaid who should have only understood as much French as a hunting-dog. 92. CYCLE. Albano heard the report; the Minister had long appeared to him contaminating, like a cold corpse of a soul; now he hated him still more as a tormenting, blood-sucking dead man. For the Princess his heart had hitherto stood security to him. She was to him a blue day-sky, wherein to others only a hot sun blazes, wherein he, however, through the mysterious depths of the soul and of friendship, had found soft constellations beaming. But now since the rumor, which, like the magicians in the presence of Moses, threw soot into her heaven, she stood, to his eyes, shining under new lights. The hatred which he by his very nature, i. e. from pride, had of all rumor, because it controls and is not to be controlled, worked in him with fresh fire; he resolved, even because Liana must be the daughter either of her hereditary foe or of her lover, and the Princess _her_ rival, to venture freely on the strength of his heart and what it knew, and at this very juncture to communicate openly to the Princess his prayer for her mediation in favor of Liana's company upon the journey,--in other words, of his heaven. On the morning after, the Prince came back,--the Princess immediately had her carriage tackled,--toward evening she came with one carriage more into town. The report ran through all card-tables that the Spanish Countess Romeiro had arrived at the Palace. Reports are polypuses; wounding and mutilating only multiplies them; only sticking them into each other makes one out of two: the report of Linda's arrival swallowed up the report of Froulay's disgraceful attempt. But Albano! Like the discovery of a new world, this turned his old one topsy-turvy. Linda, that foreign tropical bird, came flying in advance of his approaching father, who rose before him like a rich land out of the distance,--the soil where he had found so many thorns and flowers soon sank behind him, with all its treasures and days, below the horizon. Only Liana could not vanish with it; that muse of his youth must he lead with him into the land of youth. By those usual magic arts of the heart had Linda's nearness awakened in him an insuperable longing for Liana.