I awoke to a hum of voices . . . but when my eyes opened, the speakers were gone, and I lay staring at an open window beyond which the sky shone, blue and deep as a well. On a chair beside the window sat the Princess, her hands in her lap. . . . While I stared at her, two strange fancies played together in my mind like couples crossing in a dance; the first, that she sat there waiting for something to happen, and had been waiting for a very long, an endless, while; the other that her body had grown transparent. The sunlight seemed to float through it as through a curtain. I dare say that I lay incapable of movement; but this did not distress me at all, for I felt no desire to stir--only a contentment, deep as the sky outside, to rest there and let my eyes rest on her. Yet either I must have spoken or (yes, the miracle was no less likely!) she heard my thoughts; for she lifted her head and, rising, came towards me. As she drew close, her form appeared to expand, shutting out the light . . . and I drifted back into darkness. By-and-by the light glimmered again. I seemed to be rising to it, this time, like a drowned man out of deep water; drowned, not drowning, for I felt no struggle, but rather stood apart from my body and watched it ascending, the arms held downwards, rigid, the palms touching its thighs--until at the surface, on the top of a wave, my will rejoined it and forced it to look. Then I knew that I had been mistaken. The sky was there, deep as a well; and, as before, it shone through an opening; and the opening had a rounded top like the arch of a window; yet it was not a window. As before, my love sat between me and the light, and the light shone through her. My bed rocked a little under me, and for a while I fancied myself on board the _Gauntlet_, laid in my bunk and listening to the rolling of her loose ballast--until my ear distinguished and recognized the sound for that of wheels, a low rumble through which a horse's footfall plodded, beating time. I was scarcely satisfied of this before the sound grew indistinct again and became a murmur of voices. The arch that framed the sunlight widened; the sky drew nearer, breaking into vivid separate tinctures--orange, blood-red, sapphire-blue; and at the same time the Princess receded and diminished in stature. . . . The frame was a window again, and she a figure on a coloured pane, shining there in a company of saints and angels. But her voice remained beside me, speaking with another voice in a great emptiness. The other voice--a man's--talked most of the while. I could not follow what it said, but by-and-by caught a single word, "Milano"; and again two words, "The mountains" and yet again, but after an interval, "The people are poor; they give nothing; from year's end to year's end"--and the voice prolonged itself like an echo, repeating the words until, as they died away, they seemed to measure out the time.