May night. I was in the yard of our house, the aspect of which
was not changed in any particular, but as I walked beside the walls all
abloom with jasmine, honeysuckle and roses, I felt restless and troubled
as if I was seeking for some unnamable something; I seemed to have a
consciousness that someone, whom I wished ardently to see, awaited
my coming; I felt as if there was about to happen to me something so
strange and wonderful as to intoxicate me by its very advance.

At a spot where grew a very old rosebush, one that had been planted by
an ancestor and for that reason guarded sacredly, although it did
not bear more than one rose in two or three years, I saw a young girl
standing motionless with a seductive and mysterious smile upon her lips.

The twilight became a little deeper, the air more languorous.

Everywhere it became darker; but about her shone a sort of indeterminate
light, like that coming from a reflector, and her figure outlined itself
clearly against the shadows in the background.

I guessed that she was very beautiful and young; but her forehead and
her eyes were hidden from me by the veil of night; indeed, I could see
nothing very distinctly except the exquisite oval of her lower face,
and her mouth which was parted smilingly. She leaned against the old
flowerless rosebush, almost in its branches. Night came on rapidly. The
girl seemed perfectly at home in the garden; she had come I knew not
from where, for there was no door by which she could have entered; she
appeared to find it as natural to be here as I found it natural to find
her here.

I drew very close in order to get a glimpse of her eyes which puzzled
me; suddenly, in spite of the darkness that became ever thicker, I saw
them very distinctly; they also were smiling like the lips;--and they
were not just any impersonal eyes, such, for instance, as may be found
in a statue representing youth; no, on the contrary they were very
particularly somebody's eyes; more and more they impressed me as
belonging to someone already much beloved whom I, with transports of
infinite joy and tenderness had found again.

I waked from sleep with a start, and as I did so I sought to retain the
phantom being who faded away and became more and more intangible and
unreal, in proportion as my mind grew clearer through the effort it made
to remember. Could it be possible that she was not and had never been
more than a vision? Had nothingness re-engulfed and fore