conscious being within me. I had had no prevision of its existence, when
I gave way to such extravagant and apparently helpless wishes. I now
actually awaited the fulfilment of my desire; but in a condition
ill-fitted to receive it, for the effort had already exhausted me to
such a degree, that every nerve was in a conscious tremor. Nor had I
long to wait.

I heard no sound of approach: the closet-door folded back, and in
glided, open-eyed, but sightless pale as death, and clad in white,
ghostly-pure and saint-like, the Lady Alice. I shuddered from head to
foot at what I had done. She was more terrible to me in that moment than
any pale-eyed ghost could have been. For had I not exercised a kind of
necromantic art, and roused without awaking the slumbering dead? She
passed me, walking round the table at which I was seated, went to the
couch, laid herself down with a maidenly care, turned a little on one
side, with her face towards me, and gradually closed her eyes. In
something deeper than sleep she lay, and yet not in death. I rose, and
once more knelt beside her, but dared not touch her. In what far realms
of life might the lovely soul be straying! What mysterious modes of
being might now be the homely surroundings of her second life! Thoughts
unutterable rose in me, culminated, and sank, like the stars of heaven,
as I gazed on the present symbol of an absent life--a life that I loved
by means of the symbol; a symbol that I loved because of the life. How
long she lay thus, how long I gazed upon her thus, I do not know.
Gradually, but without my being able to distinguish the gradations, her
countenance altered to that of one who sleeps. But the change did not
end there. A colour, faint as the blush in the centre of a white rose,
tinged her lips, and deepened; then her cheek began to share in the hue,
then her brow and her neck. The colour was that of the cloud which, the
farthest from the sunset, yet acknowledges the rosy atmosphere. I