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Days, nights, weeks sped by. Neither one nor the other knew what they were bringing to pass. And strange happenings were now taking place, so that it became hard to distinguish how far the real and the imaginary coincided. A presence floated in the air. A form was struggling to become visible, to weave some pattern of its being upon the space no longer within its measure.

D’Athol lived a twofold life, like a visionary. The glimpse of a pale and gentle face, caught in a flash, within the twinkling of an eye; a faint chord struck on the piano, suddenly; a kiss that closed his lips at the instant of his speaking; the affinities of feminine thoughts which awoke within him in response to the words he uttered; a doubling of his own self which made him feel as if he were in some fluid mist; the perfume, the intoxicating, sweet perfume of his beloved by his side; and at night, betwixt waking and sleeping, words which he heard low-spoken—everything pointed to one thing: a negation of Death exalted finally into an unknown force!

Once d’Athol felt and saw her so clearly beside him that he took her in his arms. But with the movement she vanished.

“Poor child!” he murmured, smiling, and fell asleep again, like a lover repulsed by his smiling, drowsy mistress.

On her birthday, he placed in pleasantry some everlastings amid the bouquet of flowers which he laid on Vera’s pillow.

“Because she imagines that she’s dead!” said he.

In the end, by reason of the deep and all-compelling will of d’Athol, who thus from the strength of his love wrought the very life and presence of his wife into the lonely mansion, this mode of life acquired a gloomy and persuasive magic. Raymond himself no longer felt any alarm, having become gradually used to these impressions.

The glimpse of a black velvet robe at the bend of a pathway; the call of a laughing voice in the drawing-room; a bell rung when he awoke in the morning, just at it used to be—all this had become familiar to him: the dead woman, one might have thought, was playing with the invisible, as a child might. So well beloved did she feel herself!It was altogether natural.

A year had gone by.

On the evening of the Anniversary the Count was sitting by the fire in Vera’s room. He had just finished reading her the last verses of a Florentine tale, Callimachus, and he closed the book.

“Douschka,” he said, pouring himself out some tea,” do you remember the Vallee-des-Roses, and the banks of the Lahn, and the castle of Quatre-Tours?Do you?Didn’t that story bring them back to you?”

He rose, and in the bluish glass he saw himself paler than his wont. He took up a bracelet of pearls in a goblet and gazed at them attentively. Vera had taken the pearls from her arm (had she not?) just a little time ago, before disrobing, and the pearls were still warm, and their water softened, as by the warmth of her flesh. And here was the opal of that Siberian necklace; so well did it love Vera’s fair bosom that, when sometimes she forgot it for awhile, it would grow pale in its golden network, as if sick and languishing. (For that, in days gone by, the Countess used to love her devoted trinket!) And now this evening, the opal was gleaming as if it had just been left off, as if it were still infused with the rare magnetism of the dead beauty. As he set down the necklace and the precious stone, the count touched accidentally the cambric handkerchief: the drops of blood upon it were damp and red, like carnations on snow!And there, on the piano

who had turned the last page of that melody out of the past? Why, the sacred lamp had relit itself, there in the reliquary! Yes, its gilded flame threw a mystic light upon the face of the Madonna and on her closed eyes!And those eastern flowers, new-gathered, opening and blooming in those old Saxony vases—whose hand had just placed them there? The whole room seemed to be happy, seemed to be gifted with life, in some fashion more significant, more intense than usual. But nothing could surprise the Count!So normal did all appear to him, that he did not so much as notice the hour striking on that clock which through the whole long year had stood still.