paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms--all but one. I could not
bring myself to enter the marble room where Genevieve lay, and yet I felt
the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had
lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern
rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat
cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Genevieve lying beside
it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them
the old Spanish morion which I remembered Genevieve had once put on when
we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes
to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand,
and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life's passion to the sealed door
of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling
hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of
Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her
tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure
that I knelt and signed myself. Genevieve lay in the shadow under the
Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and
beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with
rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending, with a breaking heart, I touched the marble drapery with my
lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little
conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the
girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the