ere more distinct. They came nearer.
They reached the top of the hill. They were within whispering distance.

Vanamee, trembling, kept his head buried in his arm. The sounds, at
length, paused definitely. The Vision could come no nearer. He raised
his head and looked. The moon had risen. Its great shield of gold
stood over the eastern horizon. Within six feet of Vanamee, clear and
distinct, against the disk of the moon, stood the figure of a young
girl. She was dressed in a gown of scarlet silk, with flowing sleeves,
such as Japanese wear, embroidered with flowers and figures of
birds worked in gold threads. On either side of her face, making
three-cornered her round, white forehead, hung the soft masses of her
hair of gold. Her hands hung limply at her sides. But from between her
parted lips--lips of almost an Egyptian fulness--her breath came slow
and regular, and her eyes, heavy lidded, slanting upwards toward the
temples, perplexing, oriental, were closed. She was asleep.

From out this life of flowers, this world of colour, this atmosphere
oppressive with perfume, this darkness clogged and cloyed, and thickened
with sweet odours, she came to him. She came to him from out of the
flowers, the smell of the roses in her hair of gold, the aroma and the
imperial red of the carnations in her lips, the whiteness of the lilies,
the perfume of the lilies, and the lilies' slender, balancing grace in
her neck. Her hands disengaged the scent of the heliotrope. The folds of
her scarlet gown gave off the enervating smell of poppies. Her feet were
redolent of hyacinth. She stood before him, a Vision realised--a dream
come true. She emerged from out the invisible. He beheld her, a figure
of gold and pale vermilion, redolent of perfume, poised motionless in
the faint saffron sheen of the new-risen moon. She, a creation of sleep,
was herself asleep. She, a dream, was herself dreaming.

Called forth from out the darkness, from the grip of the earth, the
embrace of the grave, from out the memory of corruption, she rose into
light and life, divinely pure. Across that white forehead was no smudge,
no trace of an earthly pollution--no mark of a terrestrial dishonour.
He saw in her the same beauty of untainted innocence he had known in his
youth. Years had made no difference with her. She was still young.
It was the old purity that returned, the deathless beauty, the
ever-renascent life, the eternal consecrated and immortal youth. For a