r bare feet,
thrust into high-heeled slippers, lent to her presence an air of flight,
as if she had run into that room in distress or fear. Carlos, sitting up
amongst the snowy pillows of eider-down at his back, was not speaking
to her. He had done; and the flush on his cheek, the eager lustre of
his eyes, gave him an appearance of animation, almost of joy, a sort of
consuming, flame-like brilliance. They were waiting for me. With all his
eagerness and air of life, all he could do was to lift his white hand an
inch or two off the silk coverlet that spread over his limbs smoothly,
like a vast crimson pall. There was something joyous and cruel in the
shimmer of this piece of colour, contrasted with the dead white of the
linen, the duskiness of the wasted face, the dark head with no visible
body, symbolically motionless. The confused shadows and the tarnished
splendour of emblazoned draperies, looped up high under the ceiling,
fell in heavy and unstirring folds right down to the polished floor,
that reflected the lights like a sheet of water, or rather like ice.

I felt it slippery under my feet. I, alone, had to move, in this
great chamber, with its festive patches of colour amongst the funereal
shadows, with the expectant, still figures of priest and nun, servants
of passionless eternity, as if immobilized and made mute by hostile
wonder before the perishable triumph of life and love. And only the
impatient tapping of the sick man's hand on the stiff silk of the
coverlet was heard.

It called to me. Seraphina's unstirring head was lighted strongly by a
two-branched sconce on the wall; and when I stood by her side, not even
the shadow of the eyelashes on her cheek trembled. Carlos' lips moved;
his voice was almost extinct; but for all his emaciation, the profundity
of his eyes, the sunken cheeks, the hollow temples, he remained
attractive, with the charm of his gallant and romantic temper worn away
to an almost unearthly fineness.

He was going to have his desire because, on the threshold of his
spiritual inheritance, he refused, or was unable, to turn his gaze away
from this world. Father Antonio's business was to save this soul; and
with a sort of simple and sacerdotal shrewdness, in which there was much
love for his most noble penitent, he would try to appease its trouble by
a romantic satisfaction. His voice, very grave and profound, addressed
me:

"Approach, my son--nearer. We trust the natural feelings of pity w