is world had no existence
except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I
have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and
Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake
and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain."

She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague
smile:

"I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom
downstairs."

CHAPTER XLIX

Lilla descended the staircase in the transplendency of the many colored
windowpanes. The red of rubies, the blue of sapphires, the green of
emeralds, enwrapped her slim body that was still phenomenally moving in
its habitual harmoniousness. The serene progress of her person through
prismatic light, the smile that passed unchanged through rays of
varying resplendence, added another stanza to the poetry of flesh, a
stanza differing from all the rest, however, in its ominous quality of
strangeness. For now, bathed in the fortuitous magnificence of the
stained glass, she shone in herself with an unearthly bloom, as if an
abnormality that had always permeated her seductiveness were now at its
apogee--as if, with no one to witness, she had reached the utter
expression of her loveliness, which blazed forth for an instant
completely, before dissolving in this strange element that mingled with
it.

The multicolored lights released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed
round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond
the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the
wheel chair--the phantom because of which that other phantom was
traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her
footsteps. He remained with his head bowed forward, a prey, no doubt,
to such anxiety as ghosts experience. He expressed perfectly that
helplessness with which, when she had believed him to be real, he had
laid hold of her pity.

The outlines of all objects round her were clear and hard: everything
had assumed a look of preternatural density. She stood paralyzed by
the thought, "It is not illusion. It is reality."

He was looking at her.

What did he read in her face? Had he, too, heard the command that
seemed to have been shouted in her ears, "Tell him! Strike and be
free!"

"What is it?" he whispered.

Her lips parted, writhed, and uttered no sound. She was struck dumb,
no doubt by the feeling that if