her lover, seemed
also to possess and annihilate her more and more, even as he himself grew
weaker and weaker. Her features were assuming an immaterial whiteness;
and through the void of her clear eyeballs one began to espy her soul.
However, when she perceived him thus resuscitating and calling her with
arms outstretched, she in her turn arose and standing beside the bed made
answer: "I am coming, my Dario, here I am."

And then Pierre and Victorine, still on their knees, beheld a sublime
deed of such extraordinary grandeur that they remained rooted to the
floor, spell-bound as in the presence of some supra-terrestrial spectacle
in which human beings may not intervene. Benedetta herself spoke and
acted like one freed from all social and conventional ties, already
beyond life, only seeing and addressing beings and things from a great
distance, from the depths of the unknown in which she was about to
disappear.

"Ah! my Dario, so an attempt has been made to part us! It was in order
that I might never belong to you--that we might never be happy, that your
death was resolved upon, and it was known that with your life my own must
cease! And it is that man who is killing you! Yes, he is your murderer,
even if the actual blow has been dealt by another. He is the first
cause--he who stole me from you when I was about to become yours, he who
ravaged our lives, and who breathed around us the hateful poison which is
killing us. Ah! how I hate him, how I hate him; how I should like to
crush him with my hate before I die with you!"

She did not raise her voice, but spoke those terrible words in a deep
murmur, simply and passionately. Prada was not even named, and she
scarcely turned towards Pierre--who knelt, paralysed, behind her--to add
with a commanding air: "You will see his father, I charge you to tell him
that I cursed his son! That kind-hearted hero loved me well--I love him
even now, and the words you will carry to him from me will rend his
heart. But I desire that he should know--he must know, for the sake of
truth and justice."

Distracted by terror, sobbing amidst a last convulsion, Dario again
stretched forth his arms, feeling that she was no longer looking at him,
that her clear eyes were no longer fixed upon his own: "Benedetta,
Benedetta!"

"I am coming, I am coming, my Dario--I am here!" she responded, drawing
yet nearer to the bedside and almost touching him. "Ah!" she went on,
"that vow which I made to the M