Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/79

 some time all means for renewing our tête-à-tête, without being able to succeed. It might have been said that Julia sought, on her side, all possible excuses to avoid me. A short time after, there was no one between us but the servant who carried the refreshments. Julia took a finely cut-glass full of delicious sherbet. She presented it to me, saying—

"Friend, do you accept it from my hand with as much happiness as you would formerly have felt?"

"Oh, Julia! Julia!" exclaimed I, touching her alabaster fingers, whose contact sent through my veins an electric shock. "Oh, Julia!" I could not say another word; a veil slid over my sight, everything turned around me, I lost the sense of hearing; and when I came to my senses, I found myself, with surprise, reclining on a sofa, in a perfumed boudoir, Julia leaning over me, regarding me with love as formerly.

"Oh!" said I to her, trying to draw her towards me, "I have found thee again; is it not so forever, oh my beautiful angel of love and poetry? Thy life is mine, and nothing can separate us more!"

At this moment a hideous face, mounted on long spider's legs, with frog's eyes that stuck out of his forehead, suddenly opened the door of the boudoir, crying in a squeaking voice, "Where the devil did my wife go to?"

Julia, frightened, escaped from my side.

"Julia married! Julia forever lost for me?" I threw myself like a madman out of this accursed house; and this is why I ran breathlessly, bare-headed, without cloak, through the fury of the storm. The weather-cocks creaked on the roofs like frightened owls, and the gusts of night wind that whipped in the space whirlwinds of snow, seemed the voices of demons who laughed at my madness and my despair.