Do I love you a little--truly?"

"Ah, I know now that you love me, my Cosmo; but what do you say about
death?"

He did not reply. His hand was pressed against his side. She looked more
closely: the blood was welling from between the fingers. She flung her
arms around him with a faint bitter wail.

When Lisa came up, she found her mistress kneeling above a wan dead
face, which smiled on in the spectral moonbeams.

And now I will say no more about these wondrous volumes; though
I could tell many a tale out of them, and could, perhaps, vaguely
represent some entrancing thoughts of a deeper kind which I found within
them. From many a sultry noon till twilight, did I sit in that grand
hall, buried and risen again in these old books. And I trust I have
carried away in my soul some of the exhalations of their undying leaves.
In after hours of deserved or needful sorrow, portions of what I read
there have often come to me again, with an unexpected comforting;
which was not fruitless, even though the comfort might seem in itself
groundless and vain.

CHAPTER XIV

"Your gallery
Ha we pass'd through, not without much content
In many singularities; but we saw not
That which my daughter came to look upon,
The state of her mother."
Winter's Tale.

It seemed to me strange, that all this time I had heard no music in the
fairy palace. I was convinced there must be music in it, but that my
sense was as yet too gross to receive the influence of those mysterious
motions that beget sound. Sometimes I felt sure, from the way the few
figures of which I got such transitory glimpses passed me, or glided
into vacancy before me, that they were moving to the law of music;
and, in fact, several times I fancied for a moment that I heard a few
wondrous tones coming I knew not whence. But they did not last long
enough to convince me that I had heard them with the bodily sense. Such
as they were, however, they took strange liberties with me, causing me
to burst suddenly into tears, of which there was no presence to make
me ashamed, or casting me into a kind of trance of speechless delight,
which, passing as suddenly, left me faint and longing for more.

Now, on an evening, before I had been a week in the palace, I was
wandering through one lighted arcade and corridor after another. At
length I arrived, thr