"So short a time ago," crooned the ghosts--"and doubtless she has already forgotten you. You have but touched her hands: how could you hope that you had touched her heart? She will be happy, though she knows that you are unhappy; glad, though you are desolate. You gave her your dreams to keep, your hopes, your faith in love and womankind: and this is what she did with them! They are withered like that rose." He had put the yellow thing against his heart, where once he had put it when it was fresh and pure. He drew it out now and looked at it. What did it mean--that message of the rose? That, as she had once treasured the flower, so now she would treasure in its place her memory of him? "It means," chanted the ghosts, "that her friendship is as dead as this dry flower!" Did it? He would make one trial more. Vivid as was her face in his mind, he brought to the lamp his pictures of her. She had liked those pictures; in spite of herself, she had shown him that she liked them---- (The ghosts were crooning: "Though you had the brush of Diego Velasquez, she would not heed you now!") Had he painted her--he had tried to--as she should have been? Or had he painted her as she really was? He searched the pictures. Her eyes seemed to look at him with a long farewell in their blue-black depths, the parted lips to tremble on a sob. A light was born in the canvas--the reflected light of his own high faith revived. Whatever separated them, it was by no will of hers. No, there was no ghost in all the fields of night that he would listen to again: in that pictured face there was as much of pride as there was of beauty, but there was nothing of either cruelty or deceit. Yes, he had only touched her hand, but certainly hand had never yet touched hand as his touched hers. He was sure of it and sure of her. A short acquaintance--it had been long enough to prove her. A few broken words in the twilight--they were volumes. The merest breath of feeling--it would last them to their graves. He would move earth and Heaven to find Vitoria: the wine of that resolution rang in his ears and fired his heart. The sun, coming up over the Panthéon in a glory of red and gold, sent into Cartaret's room a shining messenger of royal encouragement before whose sword the ghosts forever fled. The lover was almost gay again: here was new service for her; here, for him, was work, the best surcease of sorrow. He felt like an athlete trained to the minute and crouching for the starter's pistol-shot. He believed in Vitoria! He believed in her, and so he could not doubt his own ability to discover her in the face of all hardships and to win her against all odds; he believed in her and in himself, and so he could not doubt God.