peaceful and calm;
she felt herself so strangely bound to death that she dismissed the
thought of leaving this room with a feeling akin to fear, and prepared
to do what possessed her so strongly, with a composed assurance. A
desire to kiss him arose within her, and she actually bent down toward
him, but a commanding awe arrested her, more even than the fear that he
might awake. Her body twisted and turned, she embraced him in spirit
and felt as if she were freed from the earth, like a pearl dropped from
a ring. She then rose quietly, walked softly to the other side of the
room, stretched herself on the floor, took a small penknife and opened
the veins in both wrists by deep cuts. Within a quarter of an hour she
sighed twice, and the hand of Death sought in vain to wipe the
enraptured smile from her pallid lips.

Bastide still slept on, that abysmal sleep where total oblivion chains
and numbs body and spirit. Then he began to dream. He found himself in
a spacious, secluded chamber, the centre of which was occupied by a
richly decked table. Many people were seated around it; they were
carousing and having a merry time. Suddenly all eyes were turned to the
middle of the table, where a vessel of opaque blue glass, which had not
been there before, now stood. What was in the glass receptacle? what
could it signify? who brought it? was asked in muffled tones. Thereupon
an uncanny silence ensued; all gazed now at the blue vessel, now, with
sullen suspicion, at each other. All at once, the jovial revelers of a
few moments ago arose and one accused the other of having placed the
covered dish on the table. A violent clamor now arose, some drew their
poniards, others swung chairs about, and meanwhile a slim, nude girl's
figure was seen to emerge, like white smoke, from the vessel on the
table. Bastide knew the face, it was that of the false witness
Clarissa; with snake-like glistening eyes she gazed at him, always only
at him. All the men followed her glance and they hurled themselves upon
him. "You must die! You must die!" resounded from hoarse throats, but
while they were still shouting their voices died away, the shadowy arms
of the false witness stretched themselves out and divided one of the
walls, exposing to view a blooming garden, in the centre of which stood
a scaffold hung with branches laden with ripe fruit. Bastide was a boy
once more; slowly he strode out, Clarissa's hands waved above him and
plucked the fruit, and hi