The falling dusk of that miserable day found her at the door of the tower-wing, Barnaby at her side loaded with her modest baggage, Belphegor ruffled and protesting under her arm. She was dry-eyed: there is an arid misery the desolation of which no well-spring can relieve. In this silent company she sallied out. A dumb boy, and a cat! After these months of full life, after her gorgeous dream of happiness—this was all that was left her. The road that had opened before her, alluring, fantastic almost in its promise, had led to this desolation. The Star-Dreamer sat by the open coffin in the laboratory, his head bent, his hands clasped upon his knees, holding between them the sprig of the Euphrosinum which he had absently taken from the heap of wild flowers that lay on his old friend’s breast. He was absorbed in thought. A great silence was in the room erstwhile so filled with a thousand minute sounds of restless energy. Extinct the hearth; extinct the furnace which for over twenty years had glowed night and day; mute all the little voices, cold the matras and crucibles, all as silent and as cold, as extinguished as the once eager brain of their master. But the watcher’s mind was seething with keen thoughts, busy sorrows. He had lost her—she was gone! She who had come like a lovely vision to this house when it was held as under a spell of twilight dreaming; who had reanimated it with her own life; who had brought, as she had promised, sunshine into its dusk, fresh air into its stagnation, sweetness where the must had lain; she was gone from his sweet hopes, gone in sorrow and shame! Her bright head dimmed as even now was his star under the clouds that were gathering thick and thicker with the brooding storm.