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Rh done to any other to which it had been less alien. Mental disquietude, moral tumult, were unknown to him; a shadowy pursuit, a speculative meditation, were no mere in consonance with his character than it would have been to study the stars for Chaldean knowledge of things obscure. Therefore it was with the stronger force and the more unbelief that Erceldoune felt that a well-nigh mythical mystery had power over him, and touched his heart, and stirred his thoughts, as no living woman had ever done through the varied course of his life.

So sacred had the vision of his ministering angel become to him, so intimately interwoven with holiness, loftiness, purity, with the compassion of the luminous eyes, and the hush of the convent solitudes where her picture hung, that to have seen her at the entrance of the Opera had given him a sharp and unwelcome recall to the fact of how utterly he followed—a phantom; how utterly he knew nothing of the woman who had wound herself into his thoughts.

The face which he had seen in the haze of golden light in what he had deemed his dying hour, the loveliness that he had found afresh, only afresh to lose it, in the softness of the Sicilian seas, among the heat, the noise, the maskers, the false brilliants,