knew in what place her spirit had parted; none knew by what manner of sickness she had died.  Since then, I have heard others say that she is not dead, that they have heard in their turn from others that she yet lives.  An hour ago, I knew not what to think.  To-day, I saw her in a crowded church.  I heard her voice, though I could not reach her in the throng, struggle how I would.  I followed her in haste, I lost her at one turning, I saw her before me at the next.  At last a figure, clothed as she had been clothed, entered your house.  Whether it was she I know not certainly, but I do know that in the church I saw her.  She cannot be within your dwelling without your knowledge; if she be here—­then I have found her, my journey is ended, my wanderings have led me home at last.  If she be not here, if I have been mistaken, I entreat you to let me set eyes on that other whom I mistook for her, to forgive then my mannerless intrusion and to let me go.”

Unorna had listened with half-closed eyes, but with unfaltering attention, watching the speaker’s face from beneath her drooping lids, making no effort to read his thoughts, but weighing his words and impressing every detail of his story upon her mind.  When he had done there was silence for a time, broken only by the plash and ripple of the falling water.

“She is not here,” said Unorna at last.  “You shall see for yourself.  There is indeed in this house a young girl to whom I am deeply attached, who has grown up at my side and has always lived under my roof.  She is very pale and dark, and is dressed always in black.”

“Like her I saw.”

“You shall see her again.  I will send for her.”  Unorna pressed an ivory key in the silver ball which lay beside her, attached to a thick cord of white silk.  “Ask Sletchna Axenia to come to me,” she said to the servant who opened the door in the distance, out of sight behind the forest of plants.

Amid less unusual surroundings the Wanderer would have rejected with contempt the last remnants of his belief in the identity of Unorna’s companion, with Beatrice.  But, being where he was, he felt unable to decide between the possible and the impossible, between what he might reasonably expect and what lay beyond the bounds of reason itself.  The air he breathed was so loaded with rich exotic perfumes, the woman before him was so little like other women, her strangely mismatched eyes had for his own such a disquieting attraction, all that he saw and felt and heard was so far removed from the commonplaces of daily life as to make him feel that he himself was becoming a part of some other person’s existence, that he was being gradually drawn away from his identity, and was losing the power of thinking his own thoughts.  He reasoned as the shadows reason in dreamland, the boundaries of common probability receded to an immeasurable distance, and he almost ceased to know where reality ended and where imagination took up the sequence of events.