Once again, tortured with doubt, racked with a deathless
grief, he craved an Answer of the night. Once again, mystic that he
was, he sent his mind out from him across the enchanted sea of the
Supernatural. Hope, of what he did not know, roused up within him.
Surely, on such a night as this, the hallucination must define itself.
Surely, the Manifestation must be vouchsafed.

His eyes closed, his will girding itself to a supreme effort, his senses
exalted to a state of pleasing numbness, he called upon Angele to come
to him, his voiceless cry penetrating far out into that sea of faint,
ephemeral light that floated tideless over the little valley beneath
him. Then motionless, prone upon the ground, he waited.

Months had passed since that first night when, at length, an Answer had
come to Vanamee. At first, startled out of all composure, troubled and
stirred to his lowest depths, because of the very thing for which he
sought, he resolved never again to put his strange powers to the test.
But for all that, he had come a second night to the garden, and a third,
and a fourth. At last, his visits were habitual. Night after night
he was there, surrendering himself to the influences of the place,
gradually convinced that something did actually answer when he called.
His faith increased as the winter grew into spring. As the spring
advanced and the nights became shorter, it crystallised into certainty.
Would he have her again, his love, long dead? Would she come to him once
more out of the grave, out of the night? He could not tell; he could
only hope. All that he knew was that his cry found an answer, that his
outstretched hands, groping in the darkness, met the touch of other
fingers. Patiently he waited. The nights became warmer as the spring
drew on. The stars shone clearer. The nights seemed brighter. For nearly
a month after the occasion of his first answer nothing new occurred.
Some nights it failed him entirely; upon others it was faint, illusive.

Then, at last, the most subtle, the barest of perceptible changes began.
His groping mind far-off there, wandering like a lost bird over the
valley, touched upon some thing again, touched and held it and this
time drew it a single step closer to him. His heart beating, the blood
surging in his temples, he watched with the eyes of his imagination,
this gradual approach. What was coming to him? Who was coming to him?
Shrouded in the obscurity of the night, whose was the face no