f she be here--then I have found her, my journey is ended,
my wanderings have led me home at last. If she be not here, if I have
been mistaken, I entreat you to let me set eyes on that other whom I
mistook for her, to forgive then my mannerless intrusion and to let me
go."

Unorna had listened with half-closed eyes, but with unfaltering
attention, watching the speaker's face from beneath her drooping lids,
making no effort to read his thoughts, but weighing his words and
impressing every detail of his story upon her mind. When he had done
there was silence for a time, broken only by the plash and ripple of the
falling water.

"She is not here," said Unorna at last. "You shall see for yourself.
There is indeed in this house a young girl to whom I am deeply attached,
who has grown up at my side and has always lived under my roof. She is
very pale and dark, and is dressed always in black."

"Like her I saw."

"You shall see her again. I will send for her." Unorna pressed an ivory
key in the silver ball which lay beside her, attached to a thick cord of
white silk. "Ask Sletchna Axenia to come to me," she said to the servant
who opened the door in the distance, out of sight behind the forest of
plants.

Amid less unusual surroundings the Wanderer would have rejected with
contempt the last remnants of his belief in the identity of Unorna's
companion, with Beatrice. But, being where he was, he felt unable to
decide between the possible and the impossible, between what he might
reasonably expect and what lay beyond the bounds of reason itself.
The air he breathed was so loaded with rich exotic perfumes, the woman
before him was so little like other women, her strangely mismatched eyes
had for his own such a disquieting attraction, all that he saw and felt
and heard was so far removed from the commonplaces of daily life as to
make him feel that he himself was becoming a part of some other person's
existence, that he was being gradually drawn away from his identity, and
was losing the power of thinking his own thoughts. He reasoned as
the shadows reason in dreamland, the boundaries of common probability
receded to an immeasurable distance, and he almost ceased to know where
reality ended and where imagination took up the sequence of events.

Who was this woman, who called herself Unorna? He tried to consider the
question, and to bring his intelligence to bear upon it. Was she a great
lady of Prague, rich, capricious, creat