ictures, in familiar
places, in the company of persons known to him in the long ago. She was
in Russia, in Petersburg. De Windt, not now young, his temples silvered,
his eyes grown weary, was at her side. He was succeeded by others, men
and women of exalted rank, many of them seeming oddly familiar to Ivan,
who sat entranced, watching and wondering at the vividness of the dream.
And while he gazed down the strange future of this girl, he seemed to
realize, intangibly, that she whom he watched was in some way bound up
with his own fate: connected with him by some powerful chain of
circumstance.

The pictures, continuing, began to grow hazy. Little by little his
sensations became less acute. He was yielding to the influence of
intense fatigue. Tremont saw his head droop forward to his breast, and
his eyes close. Darkness descended. Oblivion trembled over him. Then,
suddenly, there was a creak, a movement, the sound of moaning. The mists
dropped away. Tremont and the girl sprang to their feet; for the door of
the Princess' room had opened and the priest emerged.

On the father's white face were traces of emotion. His right hand was
uplifted, two of his fingers stretched out in benediction. As he spoke,
his old voice trembled:

"Let us give thanks to God for His mercy. A sinful soul, repentant and
shriven, has been gathered home."

Vittoria, with a low cry, fell upon her knees. Ivan, gone deathly white,
stepped forward.

"The Princess Nikitenko is dead?" he asked, dully.

"In the odor of sanctity, my son."

* * * * *

In one brief hour, the shattered illusion of these last weeks of Ivan's
Italian existence had crumbled utterly away. As one walks in some
unhappy dream, he endured the double ceremonies of funeral and burial. A
great crowd was present at the first of these, in the Santo Espirito;
and their eyes were glued neither on coffin nor on priest, but every one
upon the crape-shrouded figure of a girl, who knelt between Ivan and
Madame Nikitenko's heart-broken maid, Marie Latour. Next day the great
subject of the _salons_ was this girl's identity, and the reason for the
tears which every one declared had flowed so copiously from the purple
eyes that might have been stolen from the dead woman who lay upon the
high, violet-strewn catafalque, surrounded by a ring of twinkling
lights. Yet no one in that eagerly sacrilegious throng had the luck to
perceive the most dramatic figure in