ent toward the great lamp burning at the end of
the perspective, in the centre of the open space between the
walls of the dining-room. Behind him ran along Puffie, with all
the speed of his shaggy feet.

Meanwhile, in one of the drawing-rooms, the clock began to strike
eleven--one, two, three. Its deep sounds penetrated slowly the
empty space on which silence had imposed itself, until somewhere,
at the other end of the perspective, a second clock began to
strike, as if answering this one in a thinner voice and more
hurriedly. This seemed a voice, an echo, a conversation carried
on by things that were inanimate.

Darvid returned to his study, and pressing the knob of the bell
again, said to his servant:

"Put out the lights!"

He sat in one of the armchairs at the round table, and felt an
unspeakable weariness from the crown of his head to his feet.
Some light body sprang to his knee. He placed his hand on the
silky coat of the creature nestling up to him, and said:

"Puffie!"

He considered that he must renounce absolutely that colossal
affair to obtain which he had struggled so long, because
strength, and especially desire for such immense toil, seemed to
fail him. He was so tired. But if he abandons toil what will he
do; what is he to live for? What is the object of life? The
darkness was silent, and as a face without eyes seemed to gaze on
him with stubbornness and attention.

A few hours later, in a sleeping-room, furnished by the most
skilled of decorators in the capital, a night-lamp, placed on the
mantle, cast its light on a bed adorned with rich carving; a
hand, white and thin, stretched forth on the silken coverlet, and
a face, also thin, with ruddy side-whiskers, itself as if carved
out of ivory, and gleaming with a pair of blue, sleepless eyes,
which wandered through that spacious, half-lighted, chamber with
a tortured and heavy expression.

All at once Darvid raised himself in bed, and, with his elbow on
the pillow, gazed upward. Higher on the wall was the face of a
maiden, small, oval, rosy, with thick, bright hair scattered
above her Grecian forehead, and by a movement of her eyes she
seemed to summon the man gazing at her. She smiled, with rosy
lips, at him, lovingly, and moved her eyelids, inviting him.
Darvid, with raised brows, and with his forehead gathered in a
number of great wrinkles; with eyes turned to that picture above
him bent forward still more, and, with trembling lips, whispere