vanished, she tried to see it again. It would not come when she called it;
but when her thoughts left knocking at the door of the lost, and wandered
away, out came the pale, troubled, silent face again, gathering itself up
from some unknown nook in her world of phantasy, and once more, when she
tried to steady it by the fixedness of her own regard, fading back into
the mist. So the phantasm of the dead drew near and wooed, as the living
had never dared.--What if there were any good in loving? What if men and
women did not die all out, but some dim shade of each, like that pale,
mind-ghost of Wolkenlicht, floated through the eternal vapours of chaos?
And what if they might sometimes cross each other's path, meet, know that
they met, love on? Would not that revive the withered memory, fix the
fleeting ghost, give a new habitation, a body even, to the poor, unhoused
wanderers, frozen by the eternal frosts, no longer thinking beings, but
thoughts wandering through the brain of the 'Melancholy Mass?' Back with
the thought came the face of the dead Karl, and the maiden threw herself
on her bed in a flood of bitter tears. She could have loved him if he had
only lived: she did love him, for he was dead. But even in the midst of
the remorse that followed--for had she not killed him?--life seemed a less
hard and hopeless thing than before. For it is love itself and not its
responses or results that is the soul of life and its pleasures.

"Two hours passed ere she could again show herself to her father, from
whom she seemed in some new way divided by the new feeling in which he did
not, and could not share. But at last, lest he should seek her, and
finding her, should suspect her thoughts, she descended and sought him.--
For there is a maidenliness in sorrow, that wraps her garments close
around her.--But he was not to be seen; the door of the study was locked.
A shudder passed through her as she thought of what her father, who lost
no opportunity of furthering his all but perfect acquaintance with the
human form and structure, might be about with the figure which she knew