He asked to see his sister, but when they met, Pauline showed no recollection of him.  He called often, and she watched him, I noticed, with an eager, troubled look.  One night, after dinner, as he described how, in a battle, he had killed a white-coated Austrian, he seized a knife from the table, and illustrated the downward blow with which he had saved his own life.  I heard a deep sigh behind me, and turning, I saw Pauline in a dead faint.  I carried her to her room.  When she came to herself again, or rather when she rose in her bed and turned her face to mine, I saw in her eyes, what, by the mercy of God, I shall never again see there.

With eyes fixed and immovable, and dilated to their utmost extent, she rose and passed out of the room.  I followed her.  Swiftly she passed out of the house into the street, and without the slightest hesitation, turning at right angles, moved swiftly up a long, straight road.  After turning once more she stopped at a three-storeyed house.  Going up to the door, she laid her hand upon it.  I tried to lead her gently away, but she resisted.  What was I to do?  The house was an empty one.  I paused.  Once before my latch-key had opened a strange door.  Would it open this one?  I tried it.  It fitted exactly.

Without waiting for me, Pauline ran in ahead.  I shut the door.  All was darkness.  I could hear Pauline moving about on the first floor.  I followed her, and, striking a match, found myself in a room with folding-doors.  It was furnished, but the dust lay deep everywhere.  Pauline stood in the middle of the room, holding her head in her hands, striving, it seemed, to remember something.  I entered the back room with the candle I had found.  There was a piano there.  Something induced me to sit down at it and to play the first few notes of the song I had heard that terrible night.

A nervous trembling seemed to seize Pauline.  She crossed the floor towards me, and I made room for her at the piano.  With a master hand she played brilliantly the prelude of the song of which I had struck a few vagrant notes.  I waited breathlessly, expecting her to sing.  Suddenly she started wildly to her feet and, uttering a wild cry of horror, sank into my arms.  I laid her on a sofa close by.  As I held her there, a strange thing happened.

The room beyond the folding-doors was lit with a brilliant light.  Grouped round a table were four men.  One of them was Ceneri, the other Macari.  The third man was a stranger to me.  These three men were looking at a fourth man—­a young man who appeared to be falling out of his chair, clutching convulsively the hilt of a dagger, the blade of which had been buried in his heart, clearly by Macari, who stood over him.

I cannot explain this vision.  I only saw it when I held Pauline’s hand.  When I let her hand drop the scene vanished.  You may call it cataleptic, clairvoyant, anything you will; it was as I relate.

IV.—­Seeking the Truth in Siberia