ve married me if I had not gone away to save
him from it. I could keep my love for him a secret while he was well; I
could stifle it, and crush it down, and wither it up by absence. But now
he is ill, it gets beyond me; I can't master it. Oh, Marta! don't break
my heart by denying me! I have suffered so much for his sake, that I
have earned the right to nurse him!"

Marta was not proof against this last appeal. She had one great and rare
merit for a middle-aged woman--she had not forgotten her own youth.

"Come, child," said she, soothingly; "I won't attempt to deny you. Dry
your eyes, put on your mantilla; and, when we get face to face with the
doctor, try to look as old and ugly as you can, if you want to be let
into the sick-room along with me."

The ordeal of medical scrutiny was passed more easily than Marta
Angrisani had anticipated. It was of great importance, in the doctor's
opinion, that the sick man should see familiar faces at his bedside.
Nanina had only, therefore, to state that he knew her well, and that she
had sat to him as a model in the days when he was learning the art of
sculpture, to be immediately accepted as Marta's privileged assistant in
the sick-room.

The worst apprehensions felt by the doctor for the patient were soon
realized. The fever flew to his brain. For nearly six weeks he lay
prostrate, at the mercy of death; now raging with the wild strength
of delirium, and now sunk in the speechless, motionless, sleepless
exhaustion which was his only repose. At last; the blessed day came when
he enjoyed his first sleep, and when the doctor began, for the first
time, to talk of the future with hope. Even then, however, the same
terrible peculiarity marked his light dreams which had previously shown
itself in his fierce delirium. From the faintly uttered, broken phrases
which dropped from him when he slept, as from the wild words which burst
from him when his senses were deranged, the one sad discovery inevitably
resulted--that his mind was still haunted, day and night, hour after
hour, by the figure in the yellow mask.

As his bodily health improved, the doctor in attendance on him grew more
and more anxious as to the state of his mind. There was no appearance
of any positive derangement of intellect, but there was a mental
depression--an unaltering, invincible prostration, produced by his
absolute belief in the reality of the dreadful vision that he had seen
at the masked ball--which suggeste