art's twin, she who had sworn
herself to him on earth, and was there waiting to fulfil the oath to all
eternity; the woman who had become a spirit, that spirit that had taken
the shape of a woman--there she stood and smiled and changed, and yet
was changeless. And oh! what did it matter if his life was draining from
him, and oh! to die at those glittering feet, with that perfumed breath
stirring in his hair! What did he seek more when Death would be the
great immortal waking, when from twilight he passed out to light? What
more when in that dawn, awful yet smiling, she should be his and he
hers, and they twain would be one, with thought that answered thought,
since it was the same thought?

There is much that might be told--enough to fill many pages. It would be
easy, for instance, to set out long lists of the entrancing dreams which
were the soul speech of the spirit of Stella, and to some extent, to
picture them. Also the progress of the possession of Morris might be
described and the student of his history shown, step by step, how the
consummation that in her life days Stella had feared, overtook him; how
"the thing got the mastery of him," and he became "unfitted for his work
on earth!" How, too, his body wasted and his spiritual part developed,
till every physical sight and deed became a cause of irritation to his
new nature, and at times even a source of active suffering.

Thus an evil odour, the spectacle of pain, the cry of grief, the sight
of the carcases of dead animals, to take a few examples out of very
many, were agonies to his abnormal, exasperated nerves. Nor did it stop
there, since the misfortune which threatened Stella when at length
she had succeeded in becoming bodily conscious of the presence of the
eidolon of her sister, and "heard discords among the harmonies" of the
rich music of her violin, overtook him also.

Thus, for instance, in the scent of the sweetest rose at times Morris
would discover something frightful; even the guise of tender childhood
ceased to be lovely in his eyes, for now he could see and feel the
budding human brute beneath. Worse still, his beautiful companion, Mary,
fair and gracious as she was, became almost repulsive to him, so that
he shrank from her as in common life some delicate-nurtured man might
shrink from a full-bodied, coarse-tongued young fishwife. Even her daily
need of food, which was healthy though not excessive, disgusted him to
witness,--he who was out