"This minute of silence was poignant and tragic. 'Oh! my friend!' implored John-Giotto Farfadetti, 'you who have given me everything, you whose soul is so marvelously twin with mine, you must give me something of yourself that I have not yet had, and from the lack of which I am dying.' 'Is it, then, my life that you ask?' said the painter; 'it is yours; you can take it.' 'No, it is not your life; it is more than your life; it is your wife!' 'Botticellina!' cried the poet. 'Yes, Botticellina; Botticellinetta; flesh of your flesh, the soul of your soul, the dream of your dream, the magic sleep of your sorrows!' 'Botticellina! Alas! Alas! It was to be. You have drowned yourself in her, she has drowned herself in you, as in a bottomless lake, beneath the light of the moon. Alas! Alas! It was to be.' Two tears, phosphorescent in the penumbra, rolled from the eyes of the painter. The poet answered: 'Listen to me, oh! my friend! I love Botticellina, and Botticellina loves me, and we shall both die of loving one another, and of not daring to tell one another, and of not daring to unite. She and I are two fragments, long ago separated, of one and the same living being, which for perhaps two thousand years have been seeking and calling one another, and which meet at last to-day. Oh! my dear Pinggleton, unknown life has these strange, terrible, and delicious fatalities. Was there ever a more splendid poem than that which we are living to-night?' But the painter kept on repeating, in a voice more and more sorrowful, this cry: 'Botticellina! Botticellina!' He rose from the triple row of cushions upon which he was lying, and walked back and forth in the studio, feverishly. After some minutes of anxious agitation, he said: 'Botticellina was Mine. Henceforth must she be Thine?' 'She shall be Ours!' replied the poet, imperiously; 'for God has chosen you to be the point of suture for this severed soul which is She and which is I! If not, Botticellina possesses the magic pearl that dissipates dreams, I the dagger that delivers from corporeal chains. If you refuse, we shall love each other in death.' And he added, in a deep tone that resounded through the studio like a voice from the abyss: 'Perhaps it would be better so.' 'No,' cried the painter, 'you shall live. Botticellina shall be Thine, as she has been Mine. I will tear my flesh to shreds, I will tear my heart from my breast, I will break my head against the wall, but my friend shall be happy. I can suffer. Suffering, too, is voluptuousness, in another form!' 'And a voluptuousness more powerful, more bitter, more fierce than any other!' exclaimed John-Giotto Farfadetti, ecstatically; 'I envy your fate, do you know? As for me, I really believe that I shall die either of the joy of my love or of the sorrow of my friend. The hour has come. Adieu!' He rose, like an archangel. At that moment the drapery moved, opening and closing again on an illuminating apparition. It was Botticellina, draped in a flowing