Well, I have called her. I have sent her name 'Mavis!' softly out on the sunshine and still air three times, and only a little brown namesake of hers, a thrush, swinging on a branch of fir, answered me with his low autumnal piping. Mavis! She will not come,--to-day God will not make her His messenger. She cannot guess--she does not know this tragedy of my heart, greater and more poignant than all the tragedies of fiction. If she did know me as I am, I wonder what she would think of me! * * * * * Let me go back to the time when love came to me,--love, ardent, passionate, and eternal! Ah, what wild joy thrilled through me! what mad ecstasy fired my blood!--what delirious dreams possessed my brain!--I saw Lucio,--and it seemed as if the splendid eyes of some great angel had flashed a glory in my soul! With him came his friend, the foil to his beauty,--the arrogant, self-satisfied fool of a millionaire, Geoffrey Tempest,--he who bought me, and who by virtue of his purchase, is entitled by law to call himself my husband ..." Here I paused in my reading and looked up. The dead woman's eyes appeared now to regard me as steadily as herself in the opposite mirror,--the head was a little more dropped forward on the breast, and the whole face very nearly resembled that of the late Countess of Elton when the last shock of paralysis had rendered her hideous disfigurement complete. "To think I loved _that_!" I said aloud, pointing at the corpse's ghastly reflection--"Fool that I was indeed!--as great a fool as all men are who barter their lives for the possession of a woman's mere body! Why if there were any life after death,--if such a creature had a soul that at all resembled this poisoned clay, the very devils might turn away aghast from such a loathly comrade!" The candles flickered and the dead face seemed to smile,--a clock chimed in the adjoining room, but I did not count the hour,--I merely arranged the manuscript pages I held more methodically, and read on with renewed attention. XXXVI