e caught the fainting woman in his arms, drew her to his breast,
and murmured in a hollow tone:

"Pauline! Is it possible! Pauline!"

She tottered to her feet, her knees trembled, she laid both hands on
his shoulders and gazing steadily at him with head thrown back and
dilated eyes, said:

"Is it really you! Is it you, Rudolf. You are alive!"

"So you believed me dead?" he asked in a trembling voice, bowing his
head.

"I believed that you were down there," she answered, pointing to the
stone slabs at their feet.

"And you came to-day----"

"To you, Rudolf; to-day as I have come every year for twenty-seven
years. See, Rudolf, that is the wreath I laid there for you. And,"
she added in a very low tone, after a brief pause, "when I suddenly saw
you before me, I thought you had risen from this grave to see me once
more."

She again remained silent a short time, during which her glances
timorously caressed him. "And do you know what instantly convinced me
that I beheld no ghost? Because you no longer look as you did at the
time when you would have been laid here, if you had really died. The
dead do not change. But you, my poor Rudolf, have certainly altered."

"Do you find me very much changed?"

Pauline gazed at him a long time. Her eyes wandered slowly over his
figure, his features, his whole appearance, then, as if speaking to
herself, she said:

"Not really, Rudolf, not much, after all."

She was probably the only person in the world who could say it; the
only one who could see in his countenance the face of the youth of
twenty-three, as a practised eye detects, under a palimpsest, the
effaced, almost invisible characters of the original writing. For her,
his former wealth of brown locks still waved in the place of the
closely cut, thin grey hair; she saw the bushy moustache fine and
curled, the wrinkled skin ruddy and smooth, the somewhat corpulent
figure slender and pliant; she transferred to the man of fifty before
her, feature by feature, the image which lived in her faithful memory,
transfigured and handsomer than the reality had ever been. And Rudolf
did the same. His imagination effaced the little wrinkles around her
eyes and mouth, restored to those dim black eyes the sparkle and
mirthfulness of youth, developed, from the somewhat fleshy outlines,
the graceful forms of the cheeks, chin, neck, bust, which he had once
beheld and loved, recognized the raven braids which alone had lost n