“Oh!  That, naturally!  But that hardly matters.  She would only have had herself to blame for falling into the trap.”

I drew myself away from the wall, trembling and sick with dread.  Mechanically I dressed myself, and stared out at the gold of the sun which was now pouring its radiance full on the sea.  The beauty of the scene moved me not at all—­nothing mattered.  All that my consciousness could take in was that, according to what I had heard, Rafel was dead,—­drowned in the sea over which his fairy vessel the ‘Dream’ had sailed so lightly—­and that all he had said of our knowledge of each other in former lives, and of the love which had drawn us together, was mere ‘fooling’!  I leaned out of the window, and my eyes rested on the little crimson rose that still blossomed against the wall in fragrant confidence.  And then I spoke aloud, hardly conscious of my own words—­

“It is wicked”—­I said—­“wicked of God to allow us to imagine beautiful things that have no existence!  It is cruel to ordain us to love, if love must end in disappointment and treachery!  It would be better to teach us at once that life is intended to be hard and plain and without tenderness or truth, than to lead our souls into a fool’s paradise!”

Then—­all at once—­I remembered the dark Phantom of the night and its transformation into the Vision of an Angel.  I had struggled against the terror of its first spectral appearance, and had conquered my fears,—­why was I now shaken from my self-control?  What was the cause?  Voices, merely!  Voices behind a wall that spoke of death and falsehood,—­voices belonging to persons I did not know and could not see—­like the voices of the world which delight in uttering scandals and cruelties and which never praise so much as they condemn.  Voices merely!  Ah!—­but they spoke of the death of him whom I loved!—­must I not listen?  They spoke of his treachery and ‘fooling.’  Should I not hear?

And yet—­who were those persons, if persons they were, who talked of him with such easy callousness?  I had met no one in the House of Aselzion save Aselzion himself and his servant or secretary Honorius,—­who then could there be except those two to know the reasons that had brought me hither?  I began to question myself and to doubt the accuracy of the terrible news I had inadvertently overheard.  If any evil had chanced to Rafel Santoris, would Aselzion have told me he was ‘safe and well’ when he had conjured up for my comfort the picture of the ‘Dream’ yacht on the moonlit sea only a few hours ago?  Yet with my bravest effort I could not recover myself sufficiently to be quite at peace,—­and in my restless condition of mind I looked towards the turret door opening to the stairway which led to the little garden below and the seashore—­but it was fast shut, and I remembered Aselzion had locked it.  But, to my complete surprise, another door stood open,—­a door that had seemed part of the wall—­and a small room was disclosed