The love and the friendship were of the imagination, and the imagination
was begotten of the accounts given by Von Falterle, the
accomplishments-master of Albano in the village of Blümenbuhl, and of
his former pupil Liana, daughter of the Minister von Froulay. It was his
wont to paste up long altar-pieces of Liana's charms, charms which her
father had sought to enhance by means of delicate and almost meagre
fare, by shutting up his orangery, whose window he seldom lifted off
from this flower of a milder clime--until she had become a tender
creature of pastil-dust, which the gusts of fate and monsoons of climate
could almost blow to pieces. In Albano's silent heart, therefore, there
was to be seen a saintly image of Liana, the ascending Raphael's Mary,
but, like the pictures of the saints in Passion-week, hanging behind a
veil.

And as for her brother, the madcap Roquairol, who in his thirteenth year
had shot at himself with suicidal intent because the little Countess
Linda de Romeiro, Albano's father's ward, had turned her back upon him,
could our hero's admiration be withheld from a youth of his own age who
already possessed all the accomplishments and had tasted all the
passions?

When Albano entered Pestitz, eager that his dreams of love and
friendship should be realised, the aged Prince of Hohenfliess had just
departed this life, and Liana, intimate friend of the Princess Julienne,
daughter of the dead prince, was smitten with temporary blindness, due
to emotion and consequent headache. Albano first beheld her in the
garden of her father, the minister, standing in the glimmer of the moon.
The blest youth saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, and
the delicate proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt
the form. Thou too fortunate man!--to whom the only visible goddess,