It was a vigil never to be forgotten. My thoughts revolved the whole time in one and the same circle, seeking in vain support from common things. Slowly and by degrees my mind found steadiness, though with returning balance my pain grew keener and more searching. The poignant minutes stretched to days and years. For ever I fell to reconstructing those vanished scenes of memory, while striving to believe that the whole thing had been but a detailed vivid dream, and that presently I, too, should awake to find our life in the châlet as before, Julius still alive and close.... The moaning from the room overhead, where the Man watched over that other, final sleep, then brought bitterly again the sad reality, and set my thoughts whirling afresh with anguish. I was distraught and trembling.... London and my lectures, the recent climbing in the Dolomites, cities and trains and the business of daily modern life, these were the dreams.... The reality, truth, lay in that world of vision just departed ... Concerighé, Silvatela, the woman of that ancient, splendid past, the re-capture of the Temple Days when we three trod together that strange path of questing; the broken fragment of it all; the Chamber of the Vacated Bodies, and the sin of long ago; then, chief of all, the attempt to banish the Powers, evoked in those distant ages, back to their eternal home--_his_ effort to offer himself as channel--_her_ fear to lose him and her offering of herself--the failure ... and that appalling result upstairs. For, ever and again, my thoughts returned to that: the spirit of the chief transgressor hovering now without a body, waiting for the River of the Lives to bring in some dim future another opportunity for atonement. The failure...! In the glimmer of that pale, cold dawn I watched the outline of her slumbering form. I remembered her cry of sacrificing love that drew the great rushing Powers down into herself, and thus into the unresisting little body gathered now in growth against her heart. That human love the world deems great, seeking to save him to her own distress, had only blocked the progress of his soul she yearned to protect, so little understanding.... I heard her deep-drawn breathing in the darkness and wondered ... for the child that she would bear ... come to our modern strife and worldly things with this freight of elemental forces linked about his human heart and mind--fierce child of Wind and Fire...! A “natural,” perhaps a “super-natural” being.... This sense of woe and passion, haunting my long, silent vigil from night to dawn, and after it when the sunshine of the September morning lit the room and turned her face to silver--this it is that, after so many years, clings to the memory as though of yesterday. And then, without a sign or movement to prepare me, I saw that the eyes had opened and were fixed upon my face. The whispered words came instantly: “Where is he? Has he gone away?”