, indifferent, fostering hopes which had no
fulfillment, only to groan now in the torment of irreparable loss, with
a mad, thirsting love which worshiped the woman in death after scoring
her in life.

He would swear a thousand times the truth of this posthumous worship,
this desire aroused by death. And then he would lay her once more in her
eternal bed, and would depart in peace after his wild confession.

But it was impossible. The silence between them would last forever. He
must remain for all eternity with this confession of his thoughts,
unable to tell it to her, crushed beneath its weight. She had gone away
with rancor and scorn in her soul, forgetting their first love, and she
would never know that it had blossomed once more after her death.

She could not cast one glance back; she did not exist; she would never
again exist. All that he was doing and thinking, the sleepless nights
when he called to her in loving appeal, the long hours when he stood
gazing at her pictures,--all would be unknown to her. And when he died
in his turn, the silence and loneliness would be still greater. The
things which he had been unable to tell her would die with him and they
would both crumble away in the earth, strangers to each other,
prolonging their grievous error in eternity, unable to approach each
other, or see each other, without a saving word, condemned to the
fearful, unbounded void, over whose limitless firmament passed unnoticed
the desires and griefs of men.

The unhappy artist walked up and down enraged at his impotence. What
cruelty surrounded them? What dark, hard-hearted, implacable mockery was
that which drove them toward one another and then separated them
forever, forever! forbidding them to exchange a look of forgiveness, a
word to rectify their errors and to permit them to return to their
eternal sleep with new peace?

Lies--deceit that hovers about man, like a protecting atmosphere that
shields him in his path through the void of life. That grave with its
inscription was a lie; she was not there; it contained merely a few
remnants, like those of all the others, which no one could recognize,
not even he, who had loved her so dearly.

His despair made him lift his eyes to the pure, shining sky. Ah, the
heavens! A lie, too! That heavenly blue with its golden rays and
fanciful clouds was an imperceptible film, an illusion of the eyes.
Beyond the deceitful web which wraps the earth was the true heaven,
endle