On the loveliest evening, when the heavens were transparent to the very bottom of all the stars, the Prince let the weary assembly drive to Lilar, in order to make a better illusion with his two invisibilities, with the Illumination and with Liana's _tableau vivant_. With what growing anxiety and tenderness did the honest Albano's susceptible heart beat, as, during the rolling down from the woodland bridge into the expectant throng of the tumultuous populace, he thought to himself,--_She_, too, went this way into the Lilar which used to be so dear to her. His whole realm of ideas became an evening rain before the sun, of which one half trembles glistening before the sun and the other vanishes in a gray mist. Ah, before Liana it had rained without sunshine, when she to-day secretly went over merely into the Temple of _Dream_, in order only to personate a beloved being, but not to be one. Not a lamp was yet burning. Albano looked into every green depth after his angel of light. Even the Prince himself, who kept the sudden kindling up of the St. Peter's dome still awaiting his nod and beck, anticipated the pleasure, so rare at courts, of giving a twofold surprise. The Princess had spared the Minister the dilemma of a lie or an answer, for she had not inquired at all after her future court-dame Liana, like the whole of that strong class of women, indifferent to her sex, but attaching herself so much the more fixedly to a select one. Albano espied, in the dark, driving whirl, his foster-parents and Rabette; but in this reeling of the ground and of the soul he could only, like others, direct his eyes toward the veil (itself veiled) behind which he had more than all others to find and to lose. In the years of youth, however, no black veil, only a motley one, hangs down, and in all its sorrows are still hopes!