window, so that David might see,
beyond the trees of the square and above the cornices of the tall
houses, the inexhaustible improvisations of nature in the western sky.

"You have changed everything," he affirmed, drinking in her beauty, her
elegance that was always presented to him in some new guise, her
invariable manifestation of tenderness. "How did it happen? You, so
intensely in the midst of life, so lovely, who might so easily find
elsewhere----"

She did not tell him that it was the almost phantasmal quality of their
communion that made it possible.

Yet now and then, for a moment, she forgot his infirmity. He became
the young hero of an idyllic scene such as those that seem attractive
enough in adolescence. But unlike those heroes he spoke only of the
moment, since it was only the moment of which he could be sure. "You
are here!" his eyes said to her, as she entered the room. "I have this
hour at least. Nothing else matters." Then, by aid of the sunset, the
warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her
perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a
sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass
and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ playing
the _Nunc Dimittis_.

Sometimes he would say:

"When I am gone you will be as fair as ever. That is good. The
ancients who entered their temples to worship the goddess must have
redoubled their love with the thought that the beauty of her marble
person would survive them."

Or perhaps:

"Yes, you will still be young. And presently--no, I shall pretend that
you will never turn to another."

He thought her ensuing look of sadness was a reproach to him; but she
was reproaching herself.

But here was a miracle. The invalid had ceased to decline in health.
And that declension, which formerly had been uninterrupted, seemed
stopped just by the hand that she had held out to him on that first
full day of spring--by the slender hand that had owed its beauty to its
apparent uselessness.

Then he told her that he had begun to jot down, in feeble signs, some
scraps of music.

That evening, as she drove home, the city seemed hung with banners.
"Ah, fate!" she cried, clenching her fists, and uttering a savage laugh
of defiance. She entered her house radiant, erect, shining with
triumph. In the black-and-white hall, at the entrance to the
drawing-room, a man stood