It was long before, conscious of the increasing chill and the coaly darkness, I went fumbling about the room to make a light. Fortunately, I still had a half-used box of matches, vestiges of the world I had lost; and with their aid, I contrived to light a little wax candle. But as I watched the taper fitfully burning, with sputtering yellow rays that only half revealed the bare walls of the room and left eerie shadows to brood in the corners, I almost wished that I had remained in darkness. How well I remembered Yasma's teaching me to make the candle; to melt the wax; to pour it into a little wooden mould; to insert the wick in the still viscid mass! Could it be but a month ago when she had stood with me in this very room, so earnestly and yet so gaily giving me instructions? Say rather that it was years ago, eons ago!--what relation could there be between that happy self, which had laughed with Yasma, and this forlorn self, which stood here abandoned in the darkness and the cold? And as I thought of Yasma, and gazed at her handiwork, the full sense of my wretchedness swept over me. Could she really be gone, mysteriously gone, past any effort of mine to bring her back? Was it possible that many a long bitter day and cold lonely night would pass before I could see her again? Or, for that matter, how did I know that she would ever return?--How attach any hope to her vague promises? What if she could not keep those promises? What if calamity should overtake her in her hiding place? She might be ill, she might be crippled, she might be dead, and I would not even know it! While such thoughts blundered through my mind, I tried to keep occupied by kindling some dry branches and oak logs in the great open fireplace. But my broodings persisted, and would not be stilled even after a wavering golden illumination filled the cabin. Outside, the storm still moaned like a band of driven souls in pain; and the uncanny fancy came to me that lost spirits were speaking from the gale; that the spirits of the Ibandru wandered homelessly without, and that Yasma, even Yasma, might be among them! Old folk superstitions, tales of men converted into wraiths and of phantoms that appeared as men, forced themselves upon my imagination; and I found myself harboring--and, for the moment, almost crediting--notions as strange as ever disturbed the primitive soul. What if the Ibandru were not human after all? Or what if, human for half the year, they roamed the air ghost-like for the other half? Or was it that, like the Greek Persephone, they must spend six months in the sunlight and six months in some Plutonian cave?