vening the
stranger might be seen pacing behind the marble urns in a gown of gold
and silver lace, or perhaps in a black dress spotted with large
medallions of pearl and turquoise. A tall man walked by her side; and
when their silhouettes stood out against the luminous sea there came to
Lilla, with the interminable odor of roses, a soft laugh of happiness.

The sound floated across a gulf as wide as that which separates one
world from another.

As for Lilla, her world lay in the past; and all this semitropical
luxuriance of nature, enriched and complicated by an insatiable
mankind, was lost in such mistiness as had risen round her in
childhood--when her world had seemed to lie in the future. Sometimes
those past events, from her continual rehearsal of them, attained
recreation; the precious scenes surrounded her visibly and almost
tangibly; and the dark garden of the villa became the other garden, the
threshold of love. Then she realized that this was one more delusion
due to her abnormal state of mind. In her terror she reached out
through the shadows to grasp at something that might help her to regain
contact with reality. She clutched a rose, and as she crushed its
sweetness to her face its thorn pierced her lip. She burst into a fit
of crying and laughing at this reassurance--this proof that there
existed, after all, a material world, of beauty inextricably mingled
with despair.

But loneliness remained.

She expected no abatement of this loneliness; for he was gone after
showing her that it was he, of a worldful of men, for whom she had been
waiting. And now, more and more, her objective mind was filled with
hitherto unsuspected memories of him, a thousand fragmentary
recollections that she fitted together into an image more vivid than
the man himself had been. This image, gilded by layer after layer of
pathetic thoughts, enlarged by the continuous enhancement of his value,
gradually assumed an heroic magnitude, and became more splendid than a
statue in a temple. So now it was no longer a man that she
contemplated in her reveries, but a sort of god whose stubbornness had
destroyed her.

In those nightmares of hers, however, he was still a man, subject to
mortal tragedy. Waking with a cry, she discerned, in the act of fading
away against the curtains, the dead-white, wedge-shaped face of Anna
Zanidov.

One day she closed the villa and went swiftly to Lausanne.

She entered a bright consulting roo