ides enter the crypt.]

ASTOLAINE.

Where are they?

ONE OF THE SISTERS OF PALOMIDES.

Palomides!...

ASTOLAINE.

Alladine! Alladine!...

ANOTHER SISTER.

Palomides!... It is we!...

THIRD SISTER.

Fear nothing; we are alone!...

ASTOLAINE.

Come! come! we have come to rescue you!...

FOURTH SISTER.

Ablamore has fled....

FIFTH SISTER.

He is no longer in the palace....

SIXTH SISTER.

They do not answer....

ASTOLAINE.

I heard the water stirred!... This way, this way!

[_They run to the rock that overlooks the underground_.]

ONE OF THE SISTERS.

They are there!...

ANOTHER SISTER.

Yes, yes; at the very bottom of the black water.... They embrace.

THIRD SISTER.

They are dead.

FOURTH SISTER.

No, no; they are alive! they are alive!... See....

THE OTHER SISTERS.

Help! help!... Call!...

ASTOLAINE.

They make no effort to save themselves!...

ACT FIFTH.

[A corridor, so long that its furthest arches seem to lose
themselves in a kind of indoor horizon. The sisters of Palomides
wait before one of the innumerable closed doors that open into
this corridor. They seem to be guarding it. A little further down,
on the opposite side, Astolaine and the Physician converse before
another door, also closed.]

ASTOLAINE.

[_To the Physician._] Nothing has ever happened until now in this
palace, where all things have seemed to be asleep since my sisters
died; and my poor old father, pursued by a strange restlessness, has
fretted without reason at this calm, which seems, for all that,
the least dangerous form of happiness. Some time ago,--his reason
beginning to totter even then,--he went up to the top of a high tower;
and as he stretched his arms out timidly toward the forests and toward
the sea, he said to me--smiling a little fearfully at his words, as if
to disarm my incredulous smile--that he called about us events which
had long been hidden beneath the horizon. They have come, alas! sooner
and more in number than he expected, and a few days have sufficed for
them to reign in his stead. He has been their first victim. He fled
to the meadows, singing, all in tears, the evening when he had little
Alladine and luckless Palomides taken down into the crypts. He has
not since been seen. I have had search made everywhere throughout the
country and even on the sea. He has not been found. At least, I had
hoped to save those he made suffer unwitti