t?

TANNER. [all but asleep, responds with a faint groan].

MENDOZA.

O wert thou, Louisa,
The wife of Mendoza,
Mendoza's Louisa, Louisa Mendoza,
How blest were the life of Louisa's Mendoza!
How painless his longing of love for Louisa!

That is real poetry--from the heart--from the heart of hearts. Don't you
think it will move her?

No answer.

[Resignedly] Asleep, as usual. Doggrel to all the world; heavenly music
to me! Idiot that I am to wear my heart on my sleeve! [He composes
himself to sleep, murmuring] Louisa, I love thee; I love thee, Louisa;
Louisa, Louisa, Louisa, I--

Straker snores; rolls over on his side; and relapses into sleep.
Stillness settles on the Sierra; and the darkness deepens. The fire
has again buried itself in white ash and ceased to glow. The peaks show
unfathomably dark against the starry firmament; but now the stars dim
and vanish; and the sky seems to steal away out of the universe. Instead
of the Sierra there is nothing; omnipresent nothing. No sky, no peaks,
no light, no sound, no time nor space, utter void. Then somewhere
the beginning of a pallor, and with it a faint throbbing buzz as of a
ghostly violoncello palpitating on the same note endlessly. A couple of
ghostly violins presently take advantage of this bass

(a staff of music is supplied here)

and therewith the pallor reveals a man in the void, an incorporeal but
visible man, seated, absurdly enough, on nothing. For a moment he raises
his head as the music passes him by. Then, with a heavy sigh, he droops
in utter dejection; and the violins, discouraged, retrace their melody
in despair and at last give it up, extinguished by wailings from uncanny
wind instruments, thus:--

(more music)

It is all very odd. One recognizes the Mozartian strain; and on this
hint, and by the aid of certain sparkles of violet light in the pallor,
the man's costume explains itself as that of a Spanish nobleman of the
XV-XVI century. Don Juan, of course; but where? why? how? Besides, in
the brief lifting of his face, now hidden by his hat brim, there was
a curious suggestion of Tanner. A more critical, fastidious, handsome
face, paler and colder, without Tanner's impetuous credulity and
enthusiasm, and without a touch of his modern plutocratic vulgarity, but
still a resemblance, even an identity. The name too: Don Juan Tenorio,
John Tanner. Where on earth---or elsewhere--have we got to from the XX
century and th