brain swam, and I suddenly remembered going into St. Peter's on Easter
Day as a child.

It happened last night, while I was writing to you. Gertrude had gone
to bed, leaving her husband in the studio. About eleven the maids heard
him come out and call to Dionea to get up and come and sit to him. He
had had this craze once before, of seeing her and his statue by an
artificial light: you remember he had theories about the way in which
the ancients lit up the statues in their temples. Gertrude, the
servants say, was heard creeping downstairs a little later.

Do you see it? I have seen nothing else these hours, which have seemed
weeks and months. He had placed Dionea on the big marble block behind
the altar, a great curtain of dull red brocade--you know that Venetian
brocade with the gold pomegranate pattern--behind her, like a Madonna
of Van Eyck's. He showed her to me once before like this, the whiteness
of her neck and breast, the whiteness of the drapery round her flanks,
toned to the color of old marble by the light of the resin burning in
pans all round.... Before Dionea was the altar--the altar of Venus
which he had borrowed from me. He must have collected all the roses
about it, and thrown the incense upon the embers when Gertrude suddenly
entered. And then, and then...

We found her lying across the altar, her pale hair among the ashes of
the incense, her blood--she had but little to give, poor white
ghost!--trickling among the carved garlands and rams' heads, blackening
the heaped-up roses. The body of Waldemar was found at the foot of the
castle cliff. Had he hoped, by setting the place on fire, to bury
himself among its ruins, or had he not rather wished to complete in
this way the sacrifice, to make the whole temple an immense votive