for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own opened at once as if a
ray of sunlight had lighted on them.

"Good-morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome you are, bad man!"

The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in their faces,
making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell over it all that
belongs only to the earliest days of passion, just as simplicity and
artlessness are the peculiar possession of childhood. Alas! love's
springtide joys, like our own youthful laughter, must even take flight,
and live for us no longer save in memory; either for our despair, or
to shed some soothing fragrance over us, according to the bent of our
inmost thoughts.

"What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was so great a pleasure to
watch you sleeping that it brought tears to my eyes."

"And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the night while I watched
you sleeping, but not with happiness. Raphael, dear, pray listen to me.
Your breathing is labored while you sleep, and something rattles in
your chest that frightens me. You have a little dry cough when you are
asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of phthisis. In those
sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the peculiar symptoms of
that complaint. Then you are feverish; I know you are; your hand was
moist and burning----Darling, you are young," she added with a shudder,
"and you could still get over it if unfortunately----But, no," she cried
cheerfully, "there is no 'unfortunately,' the disease is contagious, so
the doctors say."

She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath through one of
those kisses in which the soul reaches its end.

"I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us both die young,
and go to heaven while flowers fill our hands."

"We always make such designs as those when we are well and strong,"
Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's hair. But even then a
horrible fit of coughing came on, one of those deep ominous coughs
that seem to come from the depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the
sufferer ghastly pale, trembling, and perspiring; with aching sides and
quivering nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very marrow
of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. Raphael slowly laid
himself down, pale, exhausted, and overcome, like a man who has spent
all the strength in him over one final effort. Pauline's eyes, grown
large with terror, were fixed upon him; she lay q