“And so,” she continued, presently, “this man’s whole life has been a delusion, ever since he began to fancy in the fever of an illness that he loved a certain woman.  Is this clear to you, my Mind?”

“It is quite clear,” answered the muffled voice.

“He was so utterly mad that he even gave that woman a name—­a name, when she had never existed except in his imagination.”

“Except in his imagination,” repeated the sleeper, without resistance.

“He called her Beatrice.  The name was suggested to him because he had fallen ill in a city of the South where a woman called Beatrice once lived and was loved by a great poet.  That was the train of self-suggestion in his delirium.  Mind, do you understand?”

“He suggested to himself the name in his illness.”

“In the same way that he suggested to himself the existence of the woman whom he afterwards believed he loved?”

“In exactly the same way.”

“It was all a curious and very interesting case of auto-hypnotic suggestion.  It made him very mad.  He is now cured of it.  Do you see that he is cured?”

The sleeper gave no answer.  The stiffened limbs did not move, indeed, nor did the glazed eyes reflect the starlight.  But he gave no answer.  The lips did not even attempt to form words.  Had Unorna been less carried away by the excitement in her own thoughts, or less absorbed in the fierce concentration of her will upon its passive subject, she would have noticed the silence and would have gone back again over the old ground.  As it was, she did not pause.

“You understand therefore, my Mind, that this Beatrice was entirely the creature of the man’s imagination.  Beatrice does not exist, because she never existed.  Beatrice never had any real being.  Do you understand?”

This time she waited for an answer, but none came.

“There never was any Beatrice,” she repeated firmly, laying her hand upon the unconscious head and bending down to gaze into the sightless eyes.

The answer did not come, but a shiver like that of an ague shook the long, graceful limbs.

“You are my Mind,” she said fiercely.  “Obey me!  There never was any Beatrice, there is no Beatrice now, and there never can be.”

The noble brow contracted in a look of agonising pain, and the whole frame shook like an aspen leaf in the wind.  The mouth moved spasmodically.

“Obey me!  Say it!” cried Unorna with passionate energy.

The lips twisted themselves, and the face was as gray as the gray snow.

“There is—­no—­Beatrice.”  The words came out slowly, and yet not distinctly, as though wrung from the heart by torture.

Unorna smiled at last, but the smile had not faded from her lips when the air was rent by a terrible cry.

“By the Eternal God of Heaven!” cried the ringing voice.  “It is a lie!—­a lie!—­a lie!”

She who had never feared anything earthly or unearthly shrank back.  She felt her heavy hair rising bodily upon her head.