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My heart gave a throb, as if bracing itself to the encounter. I
followed him through many passages, and was at last shown into a
room so large and so dark that its walls were invisible. A single
spot on the floor reflected a little light, but around that spot
all was black. I looked up, and saw at a great height an oval
aperture in the roof, on the periphery of which appeared the joints
between blocks of black marble. The light on the floor showed
close fitting slabs of the same material. I found afterward that
the elliptical wall as well was of black marble, absorbing the
little light that reached it. The roof was the long half of an
ellipsoid, and the opening in it was over one of the foci of the
ellipse of the floor. I fancied I caught sight of reddish lines,
but when I would have examined them, they were gone.
All at once, a radiant form stood in the centre of the darkness,
flashing a splendour on every side. Over a robe of soft white, her
hair streamed in a cataract, black as the marble on which it fell.
Her eyes were a luminous blackness; her arms and feet like warm
ivory. She greeted me with the innocent smile of a girl--and in
face, figure, and motion seemed but now to have stepped over the
threshold of womanhood. "Alas," thought I, "ill did I reckon my
danger! Can this be the woman I rescued--she who struck me, scorned
me, left me?" I stood gazing at her out of the darkness; she stood
gazing into it, as if searching for me.
She disappeared. "She will not acknowledge me!" I thought. But
the next instant her eyes flashed out of the dark straight into
mine. She had descried me and come to me!
"You have found me at last!" she said, laying her hand on my
shoulder. "I knew you would!"
My frame quivered with conflicting consciousnesses, to analyse
which I had no power. I was simultaneously attracted and repelled:
each sensation seemed either.
"You shiver!" she said. "This place is cold for you! Come."
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