Burdened and bowed down with grief, he softly entered. In an easy-chair reclined a white-clad figure, with white, sunken cheeks, and hands laid in one another, leaning her head, which was encircled with a variegated wreath of wild-flowers, on the arm of the chair. It was his former Liana. "Welcome to me, Albano!" said she, with feeble voice, but with the old smile, like sunrise, and stretched out to receive him her hand which she raised with difficulty; her heavy head she could not raise at all. He drew near, sank on his knee and held the precious hand, and his lip quivered and was dumb. "Thou art right welcome to me, my good Albano!" she repeated, still more tenderly, with the impression that he had not probably heard it the first time; and the well-known voice coming back to him started all the tears of his heart into one gushing rain. "Thou, too, Liana!" he stammered, still more softly. Wearily she let her head fall over on the other arm of the chair, which was nearer to her; then did her life-tired blue eyes look right closely upon his wet and fiery ones; how did each find the other's countenance paled and ennobled by one and the same long sorrow! Red-cheeked and in full bloom, and with a load of sorrows, had Liana entered the strange, cold death-realm of sore probation for the higher world, and without color and without sorrows had she come back again, and with heavenly beauty on the face from which earthly bloom had faded. Albano stood before her, pale and noble also, but he brought back on his young, sick, sunken countenance the pangs and the conflicts, and in his eye the glow of life. "O God, thou hast changed, Albano," she began, after a long gaze. "Thou lookest quite hollow: art thou so sick, love?" she asked, with that old anxiety of affection which neither the pious father nor the last genius, who makes man cold towards life and love, ere he withdraws them, had been able to take from her heart. "O, would to God!--No, I am not," said he, and stifled, out of forbearance, the internal storm; for he would so gladly have poured out his woe, his love, his death-wish before her in one mortal cry, as a nightingale sings herself to death and falls headlong from the branch. Her chilled eye long rested, warming itself, upon his face, full of inexpressible love, and at last she said with a heavy smile, "So, then, thou lovest me again, Albano! Thou wast even in Lilar wholly in error. After a long time my Albano will begin to learn why I separated from him,--only for his good. On this, this my dying-day, I tell thee that my heart has been ever true to thee. Believe me! My heart is with God, my words are true. See, this is why I begged thee to come to me to-day,--for thou shalt mildly, without remorse, without reproach, in thy long-coming life, look over upon thy first youthful love. To-day thou wilt not take it ill of thy little Linda[59] that she speaks of dying,--seest thou haply that I was then in the right? Bring me the leaf yonder!"