ilhouette outlined on it
darkly, as on a background. He looked on the brilliant assembly,
from which he was separated by half the chamber, and felt that he
was divided from those people by a space as great as if they were
at one end of the world and he at the other end. Those shadows
there whose names he knew, but who were nothing to him, and he
nothing to them. They might exist, or not; that was all one to
Darvid. Why had they come? Why were they there? Never mind, he
knew only this, that they did not exist for him, as he did not
for them. He was struck by the feeling of an immense vacuum,
which divided him from men. This vacuum was something like a
space which the eye could not take in, a space with two edges, on
one of which he was found, and they on the other. They were by
themselves, he was by himself.

The singing of the chorus rose in power, in thunders, then became
like nightingale voices heard in space, with notes clear and
resonant. Invisible movements of air passed along the crapes, and
the immense number of tapers, causing the flames on them to
quiver.

Darvid had not paid attention to music; he had never had time to
learn and to love it; but he felt that those tones were passing
into his vitals, moving the secret strata of his being, and
bringing them into movements unknown to him till that moment. He
looked at Cara's face, rising up among the white blossoms, and he
thought, or rather felt that, while those others seemed removed
by boundless space, she alone was very near to him. "Mine!" he
whispered. She alone. He did not know precisely how that could
happen, but mentally he placed that little head with golden hair
upon his shoulders, and said to it:

"Let us flee, little one! Thou didst ask me once what those
people were to me. Now I will tell thee that they are nothing. I
do not need them; they are strangers to me; with me they have no
relations whatever; thou alone art needful to me; thou alone,
such a sunray as I once saw on a journey and forgot, bright and
warm. Thou alone art mine! Let us go; let us flee together from
all and from everyone, for everything and all people are nothing
to you and me; they are strange, and distant."

Here he remembered that never and nowhere would he be able to go
with her, or to flee with her. He was joint possessor of a number
of railroads; he had the power to employ for himself alone a
number of trains passing over those roads; in the East, on a
gigantic river,