and vacancy. Then indignantly I stepped from the ilex and
confronted her. A low, glad cry escapes her lips, she holds her arms
toward me and would cross the sill, when a voice constrains her from
within. It is he, the accursed Neapolitan.

"Signor," she says, "a vampire flitted past the dawn."

Dawn indeed was breaking. The man still stood there when she left him,
and still looked out; his eyes lay on me, and irate and motionless
I returned their gaze. One by one her guests departed; with a last
threatening glance, he, too, withdrew. I plunged into the silent places
again, and waited now, assured that she would come. The constellations
paled, and still I was alone. Then I wandered restlessly again, and,
winding through thickets of leaf-distilled perfume, I came where just
above a balcony, and almost beyond reach from it, a light burned dimly
in one narrow window. I did not ask myself why I did it, but in another
moment I had clambered to the place, and, standing there, I bent forward
to my right, pulled away the tangle of ivy that filled half the niche,
and was peering in.

"What is that?" said a voice I knew, with its silvery echo of the South,
the accursed Neapolitan's.

"It is the owl that builds in the recess, and stirs the ivy," she
replied.

"Haste!" said a third,--"the day breaks."

She was sitting at a low table, writing; Pia, the old nurse, stood
behind her chair; the oil was richly scented that she burned; the
single light illumined only her, and covered with her shadow the low
ceiling,--a shadow that seemed to hang above her like a pall ready to
fall from ghostly fingers and smother her in its folds; the others
lounged about the room and waited on her pen, in gloom they, their faces
gleaming from that dusk demoniacly. It was a concealed room, entered by
secret ways, unknown to others than these.

When she had written, she sealed.

"There is no more to await. Adieu," she said.

"It is some transfer of property, some legal paper, some sale, some
gift," I said to myself, as I watched them take it and depart. Then she
was alone again. I saw her start up, pace the narrow spot,--saw her
stand and pull down the masses, so interspersed with golden light, that
crowned her head, and look at them wonderingly as they overlay her
fingers,--then saw those fingers clasped across the eyes, and the
lips part with a sigh that, prolonged and deepened, grew to be a
groan,--while all the time that shadow on the ceiling