She had sunk back into the arm-chair, and Antonio was sitting at her feet. "Hellish arts," she again began, "have seemingly awakened me from death. The same man whom my inexperienced youth honoured as an apostle, is a spirit of darkness. He gave me this shadow of life. He loves me, as he says. How my heart shrank back from him when my awakening eye beheld him. I sleep, I breathe; I may, if I choose, be restored to life altogether, so that wicked man has promist me, if I will give myself up to him with my whole heart, if in secret concealment I will let him become my husband.... O Antonio, how hard is every word to me, every thought! All his art crumbles before my longing for death. It was frightful, when my spirit, already at rest, with new visions already unfolding before it, was summoned back so cruelly out of its calm peace. My body was already a stranger to me, a hostile and hateful thing. I came back like the freed slave to chains and a dungeon. Help me, my true lover; save me." "How!" said Antonio: "Oh God in Heaven! what have I lived to! in what a state do I find thee again! And thou canst not, mayst not return to life altogether? thou canst not again be mine, again be thy parents' dear child?" "Impossible!" cried Crescentia with a tone of anguish, and her paleness became yet whiter from dismay. "Alas! Life! How can any one seek it again, who has once been set free from it? Thou, my poor Antonio, conceivest not the deep longing, the love, the rapture, wherewith I think upon death and pant for it. Even more intensely than of yore I loved thee, even more fervently than my lips at the Easter festival pined for the holy wafer, do I now yearn for death. Then I shall love thee more freely and more wholly in God; then I shall be given back to my parents. Then I shall live; formerly I was dead; now I am a cloud and a shadow, a riddle to myself and to thee. Alas, when thy love and our youth have gleamed in upon me in my present state, when I have heard my well-known nightingale from above pouring her song into my loneliness, what a sweet shuddering, what a dark joy and pain have then rippled through the dusk of my being! O help me to get loose from this chain." "What can I do for thee?" askt Antonio. Her talking had again broken the strength of the apparition: she paused awhile with closed eyelids; then she spake faintly: "Alas! if I could go into a church, if I could be present when the Lord is lifted up and appears to the congregation in the sacrament, then in that blessed moment I should die of rapture." "What should hinder me," said Antonio, "from informing against the villain, and delivering him up to the tribunals and to the inquisition?"