“‘Get along with you, old fool.  And be quick about it!’

“Rosita fled frightened, hardly taking time to collect her little instruments.

“‘Was it not Fate, that on this July midnight....’

“I obeyed the Negress’s suggestion.  Following the corridors, losing my way, set on the right road again by the Reverend Spardek, I pushed open the door of the red marble hall.  I entered.

“The freshness of the perfumed crypt did me good.  No place can be so sinister that it is not, as it were, purified by the murmur of running water.  The cascade, gurgling in the middle hall, comforted me.  One day before an attack I was lying with my section in deep grass, waiting for the moment, the blast of the bugle, which would demand that we leap forward into the hail of bullets.  A stream was at my feet.  I listened to its fresh rippling.  I admired the play of light and shade in the transparent water, the little beasts, the little black fish, the green grass, the yellow wrinkled sand....  The mystery of water always has carried me out of myself.

“Here, in this magic hall, my thoughts were held by the dark cascade.  It felt friendly.  It kept me from faltering in the midst of these rigid evidences of so many monstrous sacrifices....  Number 26.  It was he all right.  Lieutenant Douglas Kaine, born at Edinburgh, September 21, 1862.  Died at Ahaggar, July 16, 1890.  Twenty-eight.  He wasn’t even twenty-eight!  His face was thin under the coat of orichalch.  His mouth sad and passionate.  It was certainly he.  Poor youngster.—­Edinburgh,—­I knew Edinburgh, without ever having been there.  From the wall of the castle you can see the Pentland hills.  “Look a little lower down,” said Stevenson’s sweet Miss Flora to Anne of Saint-Yves, “look a little lower down and you will see, in the fold of the hill, a clump of trees and a curl of smoke that rises from among them.  That is Swanston Cottage, where my brother and I live with my aunt.  If it really pleases you to see it, I shall be glad.”  When he left for Darfour, Douglas Kaine must surely have left in Edinburgh a Miss Flora, as blonde as Saint-Yves’ Flora.  But what are these slips of girls beside Antinea!  Kaine, however sensible a mortal, however made for this kind of love, had loved otherwise.  He was dead.  And here was number 27, on account of whom Kaine dashed himself on the rocks of the Sahara, and who, in his turn, is dead also.

“To die, to love.  How naturally the word resounded in the red marble hall.  How Antinea seemed to tower above that circle of pale statues!  Does love, then, need so much death in order that it may be multiplied?  Other women, in other parts of the world, are doubtless as beautiful as Antinea, more beautiful perhaps.  I hold you to witness that I have not said much about her beauty.  Why then, this obsession, this fever, this consumption of all my being?  Why am I ready, for the sake of pressing this quivering form within my arms for one instant, to face things that I dare not think of for fear I should tremble before them?