and knocked, my heart failed me.  I dreaded meeting this strange noblewoman, almost regretted the nearness of the ‘Zorzi,’ knowing the actual colours could hardly surpass those of my fancy.  The little speeches I had been rehearsing resolved themselves into silence again as I saw her by a tiny fire; a compelling apparition, erect, with snowy hair waving high over burning black eyes.  To-day when I coldly analyse her fascination I recall nothing but these simple elements.  She permitted not a moment of the shyness that has always plagued me.  What our words were I do not now know, but I know that I kissed the two hands she held out to me as she called me Mantovani’s son and her friend.  Then I talked as never before or since, told her of my struggles and ambitions, and from time to time I was mute so that I might hear the deep contralto of the French she spoke perfectly but with Spanish resonance.  There was probably tea.  Anyhow the light went away from the deep casements unnoticed, and it was she who, with a chiding finger, recalled me to duty and the Giorgione.  ‘Wretch,’ said she, ’you are here to see it not me.  The light is going and your devoirs yet unpaid.’

“As she took my arm and led me through the gallery, I had an odd presentiment of going towards a doom.  While I followed her up a winding stair, the misgiving increased.  Did venerable lemurs inhabit the Basque mountains?  Could so magnificent; an old age be of this earth?  An ancestral shudder from the Steppes came over me.  It was her ruddy train rustling round the turns ahead that aroused these atavistic superstitions.  But when we stood together on the landing all doubts fell away; a broad ray of sunlight that struck through an open doorway showed her spectral beauty to be after all reassuringly corporeal.  Over the threshold she fairly pushed me with the warning, ’The place is holy, we must be silent.’  For a moment I was staggered by the wide pencil of light that shot through a porthole and cut the room in two.  The little octagon, a tower chamber I took it to be, was a prism of shadow enclosing a shaft of flying golddust.  Outside it must have been full sunset.  Near the border line of light and darkness I faintly saw the ‘Zorzi,’ which borrowed a glory from the moment and from her.  I felt her hand on my shoulder and knelt, it seemed for minutes, it probably was for seconds only.  The picture, which I had not seen, much less examined, swam in the twilight and became the most gracious that had ever met my eyes.  The dusk grew as the disc of light climbed up the wall and faded.  She whispered in my ear, ‘It is enough for now.  You shall come again many times.’  I recall nothing more except the Marquesa’s silvery hair and the long line of her crimson gown as she bade me ‘Au revoir’ at the head of the great stairs.  That night in the miserable fonda below I wrote out feverishly the notes which you have doubtless read in the ‘Mihrab,’ and I would give my right hand to be able to forget.”