while he was engaged on "Hesperus," a fact that explains why
certain characters from the earlier romance reappear in
"Titan."


_I.--Liana_


For many years Albano, the young Spanish Count Cesara, had lived within
sight of the capital city of the state of Hohenfliess; yet he had never
entered it--his mother, so his father told him, had shut it against him,
desiring that he should be reared in the Carthusian monastery of rural
life, not sullied in his youth by mingling with courtiers and men of the
world.

And now the gates of Pestitz were open to him. Contemplate the heated
face of my hero, who at last is riding into the streets, built up in his
fancy of temples of the sun, where who knows but that at every long
window, on every balcony, his beloved Liana may be standing?

Gaspard, Count Cesara, Knight of the Fleece, had met his son, for the
first time in Albano's memory, at Lake Maggiore, and Albano had come
away from the meeting with a feeling of chill that poisoned his heart,
eager as it was to love and be loved, and a vague, discomposing sense
that in his birth there was a mystery. But the thought of his father's
coldness, all thoughts that troubled and confused, were forgotten on his
entry into Pestitz, in the eager hope of seeing Liana, his beloved, and
his friend, her brother, Charles Roquairol; for neither his beloved nor
her brother had he ever yet in his life beheld.