violent exception
was what he called her plebeian caution; she seemed determined to pay
due and conventional respect to appearances. He did not wish to lay
claim to the hours of his love as though they were a stolen possession;
he did not wish to sneak across bridges and through halls; he did not
wish to whisper; he did not wish to lie in wait for a secret tryst; he
rebelled at the thought of coming and going in fear and trembling.

There is not the slightest use to investigate all the secrecies between
Daniel and Eleanore. It will serve no useful end to infringe with
unskilled hand on the work of the evil spirit Asmodeus, who makes walls
transparent and allows his devotees to look into bed chambers. It would
be futile to act as the spy of Daniel and show how he left the attic
room in the dead of night and crept down the stairs in felt slippers. We
have no desire to hear of Eleanore's pangs of conscience and her
longings, her flights, her waiting in burning suspense; to relate how
she endeavoured to avert the inevitable to-day and succumbed to-morrow
would be to tell an idle tale. It is best to overlook all these things;
to draw a curtain of mercy before them; for they are so human and so
wholly without a trace of the miraculous.

It will be enough to touch upon a single night on which Daniel went to
Eleanore's room and said: "I have never yet seen you as a lover sees his
beloved." Eleanore was sitting on the edge of her bed, trembling. She
blew out the candle. Daniel heard the rustling of her clothes. She went
up to the stove and opened the front draft door. There was a red hot
coal fire in the stove. She stood before him with the purple glow of the
burning coals upon her body, slender, delicate, nude. Her figure,
peculiarly beautiful, was filled with the most harmonious of
inspiration; it was ensouled. And since the play of her limbs, as they
became conscious of the light, was suddenly stiffened with shame,
Eleanore bent her head over to the wall where the mask of Zingarella,
which he had given her, was hanging. She took it down, and held it with
both hands so that the purple glow from the stove fell also on it. As
she did this she smiled in a way that cut Daniel to the very heart:
something eternal came over him; he had a premonition of the end; he
feared fate.

At the same time Gertrude rose up in her bed, and stared with eyes as
if she were beholding, who knows whom? at the door. After she had stared
for a long