There descended upon her the full weight of her forebodings--the superstitious dread that was typical of her emotional defectiveness, and that had its origin, perhaps, in those two unhappy persons who had been her parents. Yet when she moaned, "Ah, Anna Zanidov!" it was with an accent of reproach as keen as though the prophetess of a tragedy must be the cause of it. The sunshine was dissolving the luxurious room. There came to her, like a dullness from a drug, the fancy that this world had no existence except that with which her credulity had endowed it. "All my life I have been dreaming this dream in which Lawrence and David, Hamoud and Anna Zanidov, America and Africa, are figments. Presently I shall wake and wonder why all these figments gave me so much pain." She floated deliciously in this thought. She reflected, with a vague smile: "I must go and restore the appearance of happiness to that poor phantom downstairs." CHAPTER XLIX Lilla descended the staircase in the transplendency of the many colored windowpanes. The red of rubies, the blue of sapphires, the green of emeralds, enwrapped her slim body that was still phenomenally moving in its habitual harmoniousness. The serene progress of her person through prismatic light, the smile that passed unchanged through rays of varying resplendence, added another stanza to the poetry of flesh, a stanza differing from all the rest, however, in its ominous quality of strangeness. For now, bathed in the fortuitous magnificence of the stained glass, she shone in herself with an unearthly bloom, as if an abnormality that had always permeated her seductiveness were now at its apogee--as if, with no one to witness, she had reached the utter expression of her loveliness, which blazed forth for an instant completely, before dissolving in this strange element that mingled with it. The multicolored lights released her. A pale, cold atmosphere closed round her as she traversed the sunless hall and living room. Beyond the doorway of the study this cold pallor rested on the figure in the wheel chair--the phantom because of which that other phantom was traveling toward an exotic semblance of death. He had not heard her footsteps. He remained with his head bowed forward, a prey, no doubt, to such anxiety as ghosts experience. He expressed perfectly that helplessness with which, when she had believed him to be real, he had laid hold of her pity. The outlines of all objects round her were clear and hard: everything had assumed a look of preternatural density. She stood paralyzed by the thought, "It is not illusion. It is reality." He was looking at her. What did he read in her face? Had he, too, heard the command that seemed to have been shouted in her ears, "Tell him! Strike and be free!" "What is it?" he whispered.