yer,
"Liana, appear, and give me peace!" to the high, shut-up heavens.

"Poor brother!" said Schoppe the librarian, his old preceptor and dear
friend. "I swear to thee thou shalt get thy peace to-day."

He went to Linda de Romeiro, now in Pestitz after long wandering, and
placed his design before her. Would the Princess Idoine, Liana's
likeness, appear before Albano as a vision and give him peace? Linda
consented to plead with Idoine. But Idoine made a difficulty. It was not
the unusualness and impropriety of the thing that she dreaded, but the
untruthfulness and unworthiness of playing false with the holy name of a
departed soul, and cheating a sick man with a superficial similarity.

At length Idoine gave her decision. "If a human life hangs upon this, I
must conquer my feeling."

As eight o'clock struck, Albano knelt in the dusk, crying, "Peace,
peace!"

Idoine trembled as she heard him; but she entered, clothed in white, the
image of the dead Liana.

"Albano, have peace!" she said, in a low and faltering tone.

"Liana!" he groaned, weeping.

"Peace!" cried she more strongly, and vanished.

"I have my peace now, good Schoppe," said Albano softly, "and now I will
sleep."

Time gradually unfolded Albano's grief instead of weakening it. His life
had become a night, in which the moon is under the earth, and he could
not believe that Luna would gradually return with an increasing bow of
light. Not joys, but only actions--those remote stars of night--were now
his aim. As he travelled with his father in Italy after his recovery,
the news of the French Revolution gave an object to his eagerness.

"Take here my word," he wrote to Schoppe, "that as soon as the probable
war of Gallic freedom breaks out I take my part decidedly in it, for
it."

But at Ischia, Albano was dazzled by a wonder; he saw Linda de Romeiro.
When she raised her veil, beauty and brightness streamed out of a rising
sun; delicate, maidenly colours, lovely lines and sweet fullness of
youth played like a flower garland about the brow of a goddess, with
soft blossoms around the holy seriousness and mighty will on brow and
lip, and around the dark glow of the large eye.

As Albano and Linda walked on the mountain Epomeo, looking upon the
coasts and promontories of that rare region, upon cities and sea, upon
Vesuvius without flame or thunder, white with sand or snow, Albano's
heart was an asbestos leaf written over and cast into the fire--burning,