s with an excitement almost
insane, and a pleasure the more sorrowful that he was aware of its
transientness, a pleasure now mingling, now alternating with utter
despair, that Faber returned to sit in the darkened chamber, watching
the woman who with such sweet torture reminded him of her whom he had
lost. What a strange, unfathomable thing is the pleasure given us by a
likeness! It is one of the mysteries of our humanity. Now she had seemed
more, now less like his Juliet; but all the time he could see her at
best only very partially. Ever since his fall, his sight had been weak,
especially in twilight, and even when, once or twice, he stood over her
as she slept, and strained his eyes to their utmost, he could not tell
what he saw. For, in the hope that, by the time it did come, its way
would have been prepared by a host of foregone thoughts, Dorothy had
schemed to delay as much as she could the discovery which she trusted in
her heart must come at last; and had therefore contrived, not by drawn
curtains merely, but by closed Venetian shutters as well, to darken the
room greatly. And now he had no light but a small lamp, with a shade.

He had taken a book with him, but it was little he read that night. At
almost regular intervals he rose to see how his patient fared. She was
still floating in the twilight shallows of death, whether softly
drifting on the ebb-tide of sleep, out into the open sea, or, on its
flow, again up the river of life, he could not yet tell. Once the nurse
entered the room to see if any thing were wanted. Faber lifted his head,
and motioned her angrily away, making no ghost of a sound. The night
wore on, and still she slept. In his sleepless and bloodless brain
strangest thoughts and feelings went and came. The scents of old roses,
the stings of old sins, awoke and vanished, like the pulsing of
fire-flies. But even now he was the watcher of his own moods; and when
among the rest the thought would come: "What if this _should_ be my own
Juliet! Do not time and place agree with the possibility?" and for a
moment life seemed as if it would burst into the very madness of
delight, ever and again his common sense drove him to conclude that his
imagination was fooling him. He dared not yield to the intoxicating
idea. If he did, he would be like a man drinking poison, well knowing
that every sip, in itself a delight, brought him a step nearer to agony
and death! When she should wake, and he let the light fal