XII.


Never perhaps was the heart of man absorbed for so many long hours in
one strange and overwhelming speculation. Suspended between death and
love, I was unable to divine, as I gazed on the angel form that lay
sleeping before me, whether this night in its mystery would bring-forth
endless anguish, or whether undying love would come in the morning,
with returning life and joy. In the convulsive movements of her
troubled sleep she had thrown the sheet off one of her shoulders upon
which fell the long luxuriant curls of her lustrous hair. The neck had
yielded to the weight of the head, which was thrown back on the pillow,
and slightly inclined towards the left shoulder; one of the arms was
disengaged from the cover-lid and was placed beneath the head, showing
the ivory whiteness of the elbow, which stood out on the coarse brown
linen in which the peasant women had dressed her. On one of the fingers
of the hand, which was half concealed in the masses of dark hair, there
was a small gold ring with a sparkling ruby, on which the rays of the
lamp flashed. The girls had lain down on the floor without undressing,
and their mother had fallen asleep with her hands folded on the back of
a wooden chair. As soon as the cock crowed in the yard, they got up,
and taking their wooden shoes in their hands, noiselessly descended the
ladder to go to work. I remained alone.

The first gleams of dawn came through the closed shutter in almost
imperceptible streaks of light. I opened the window in the hope that
the balmy morning air from the lake and mountains, which awakened all
Nature, would have the same effect on one whom I would willingly have