He played long, losing himself, finding a melodious vesture for his half-formed dream. The night was very quiet; it came to be very late without his perceiving it. Suddenly he felt a cool air on his forehead--he looked up, and paused in his playing, his hands motionless above the keys, his lips open. He felt that he ought to speak, but his voice failed to answer his will. He was asking himself in the dim background of his consciousness how the Countess Paula von Schattenort had entered his dwelling so noiselessly, and what she might be seeking there. More clearly he was wondering at her face, strangely still and white, vaguely woe-begone, astonished, pathetic. He recognized her, yet she seemed to him altered from the one he sometimes saw on the balcony and met on the stairs--that object without interest, a woman not pretty. Perhaps it was the wonderful hair that, shining along her cheeks like a pale gilded mist, transfigured her. The firm fine braids that heretofore he had seen always wound in austere simplicity about her head were undone; the narrowly waved hair floated to her knees; her face peered wistfully between two shimmering bands of it. She was clothed in a white garment bordered with dark fur; a heavy rosary hung about her neck. She looked at him a long moment with fixed eyes, an expression of plaintive disillusion, and said nothing. He tried to ask in what manner he might serve her, but his tongue was numb. She turned and looked all about the room, very slowly, as a person seeking something. Then she looked again at him, silently, with that same face of disappointment; and her hands, that had been tightly shut on the golden crucifix appended to her rosary, opened and slipped softly to her sides. She turned to the door. He rose from his seat, and without taking his eyes from her, fumbled to lift the candle from its socket, to light her way; he was awkward in his amazement. He saw her pass the threshold. In a second he followed her. She was not in the next room. He passed through the two rooms that separated him from the door leading to the common stairway. He came to the door; it was as he had left it, secured for the night. Seized with dismay, in spite of the thought that she must have lingered behind in the shady embrasure of a window, he undid the chain and bolt and came out on the landing and looked, expecting inconsistently to see a white figure vanishing down the steps. He saw nothing but a faint light cast upon the wall at the turn of the stairs. He stood hesitating. In a moment he heard below a sound of weeping; he went down with a trembling of the knees. On the landing of the _piano nobile_ was the landlady. She had set her little brass lamp on the last step, and was crying. The door to the Countess's apartment was wide open, and the draught from there made the tiny flame flicker and smoke. "What is it?" said Prospero, in a husky whisper. "She is dead, the poor lady!" sobbed the _padrona_.