Soon afterward, while David was at work shut up in the study, and Lilla was trying to read a book in the living room, the doorbell rang. When she heard Hamoud, in the hall, speaking quickly in Arabic, her body relaxed. She thought: "He has found one of his own people. I am glad. He must have been so lonely all this while!" She heard another voice, deeper and more vibrant. "Yes, Arabic," she said, smiling contentedly. Of a sudden, for some inexplicable reason, she felt as if she were going to faint. She raised her eyes from the book, and saw a tall man with a black beard, standing in the hall doorway, watching her. She was seized with the paralyzing chill that comes to those who seem to be confronted by apparitions of the dead. Her conviction that she saw no living man was strengthened by his physical alteration. His black beard, which covered even his cheekbones, masked a shriveled countenance. His eyes had receded into their sockets; his lips were stretched over his teeth; and the swarthiness of his skin had become sulphurous. The stillness of his attitude, and his blank, attentive look, completed the effect of unreality. Then she thought, "Perhaps it's I who am dead." Her surroundings melted away. All her obligations related to these surroundings melted also. She began to float toward him, over the floor that she no longer felt beneath her feet, so that her disembodied spirit might be merged with this other spirit. Her half-raised hands prepared to cling to him--as though one phantom could cling fast to another! But abruptly an invisible force seemed to check her progress mid-way; and she stood before him with her arms, that had meant to embrace him, lifted in what appeared to be a gesture of horrified denial. There was no change in his face disfigured by unhappiness and illness. The air round them began to tremble with strains of music--harmonies mounting up toward a climax of intolerable beauty. It came, this perfect epitome of love, from behind the closed doors of the study, where David Verne was playing as never before. "Lilla!" A profound silence followed the call that neither of these two had uttered. And from behind the closed doors, David, transported by his exultation, cried out again to the Muse: "Lilla! Lilla!" Swaying aside, she sank down into a chair. "Oh," she breathed, looking at the rug as though some very precious object had slipped from her hands and broken at her feet. As she sat there, a huddle of coffee-colored fabric and pallid flesh, the sunlight burst through the clouds to smite her all over with its glory, igniting her hair, turning her face into incandescent gold. Lawrence Teck watched this transformation.