"We entered the brilliantly lighted hall. The orchestra played bacchantic music, and in bacchantic madness the dancers rushed by each other. The dazzling lights, the loud trumpets, the crowds, the heat, the narcotic fragrance of exotics, with which the room was adorned, and the fearful excitement under which I labored, took away my breath. I had to lean for a moment against a pillar, and closed my eyes in order to collect myself. As I was standing thus, faint and nearly falling, a voice fell upon my ear which stung me at the first note like an adder. The ear is a faithful monitor; it never in all this life forgets a voice whose notes have once been sweet and dear to it. It had not deceived me. "Close before me, so close that I could have touched her with my hand, stood a girl, talking fast to a handsome young man; she was tall and slender, had large, brown eyes, which shone with feverish brightness, and a face far too sharply accented, too much worn out by life for so young a person, but nevertheless still very beautiful--and this girl was Leonora. "Strange! when I had first heard her voice my heart had trembled as at the moment when I stood at night before the house in Fichtenau, and the old woman called down to me that Leonora had eloped. But after the first spasm I felt calm, quite calm. The chord had been stretched too far, it had broke; it now uttered not a sound of joy or of grief. I looked down upon Leonora as coldly as if she were a picture on the wall. I heard every word she said to her partner, as we hear words just before we are going to faint--as if they had been spoken at the other end of the hall. I examined her from head to foot, even her costume, with the calm criticism of an artist. I noticed that she was rouged, and that her dark eyebrows and lashes were dyed still darker. I noticed that she wore her hair exactly in the same manner in which I had myself once arranged it, after an antique, and as she had ever after worn it as long as I knew her. I heard everything, I saw everything, and yet I heard and saw nothing; for I had no clear perception of what I saw and heard. "My companion, who had looked all around the hall in the meantime, now returned to where I stood. 'I have not been able to find any one corresponding to your description,' he said. 'God be thanked! I breathe more freely; I should not have liked, for the world, to have found her whom we look for in this place. But, _mon Dieu_, what is the matter? You look like a corpse!' "'I have found her.' "'Where?' "'There!' "He took his glass and examined Leonora for a few moments with most intense interest. She was still perfectly unconscious of those who were so near to her, and chatted and coquetted with her dancer. "Then he shrugged his shoulders with pity and dropped his eye-glass. His face had become very serious. "'_Pauvre homme_!' he whispered to himself.