I was thus worshipping a pure fiction, engendered, to all appearance in the vapors of my brain. But this was precisely what I failed to be convinced of. I had seen and heard this marvel of beauty; she existed in a region that it was impossible for me to attain, but from which it was possible for her to descend to me. To solve the problem of this indefinable existence, and the mystery of the tie that bound us would have rendered me insane. I was conscious of the fact, I wished to explain nothing, to fathom nothing; I lived upon faith, which is “the evidence of things not seen,” a sublime madness, if reason is only to be proved by the evidence of the senses. My madness was not so puerile as might have been feared. I nursed it as a superior faculty and did not allow it to descend from the heights upon which I had enthroned it. Thus I abstained from another evocation, lest I should lose myself in the cabalistic pursuit of some chimera unworthy of me. The immortal maiden had said that “I must become worthy, if she were to live in my thoughts.” She had not promised to reappear in the same form as I had seen her. She had said that this form did not exist and was but the product of my imagination caused by the elevation of my feelings towards her. I ought not then to torment my brain to reproduce her, for it might misrepresent her and cause some other image to obliterate her own. I wished to purify my life and cultivate the treasure of conscience, in the hope, that at some given time, this celestial figure would come to me of her own accord and talk to me in those cherished tones that through my unworthiness had been vouchsafed me for so short a time. Under the influence of this mania, I was in the way of becoming a good man, and it was rather odd that I should be led to wisdom through madness. But all this was too subtle and too tense for human nature. This rupture of my soul with the rest of my being, and of my life with the temptations of youth, was gradually leading me on to despair, perhaps even to insanity. So far I was only melancholy, and although very pale and very thin, I did not appear to be ill either physically or mentally when the turn came for the hearing of the case of d’Ionis versus d’Aillane. My father instructed me to prepare my speech for the following week. It was now about three months since I had left, on a morning in June for the fatal chateau d’Ionis. CHAPTER V. THE DUEL.