University of Virginia Library

18. XVIII.

THE night was dull and overcast, with a small rain in the air. To my amazement there was no one at the tree. I walked round it several times, went to the edge of the wood, returned, peered sharply into the shadows; no one to be seen. For awhile I waited, then I called Ellis by name, softly at first, then more and more loudly, but she did not make her appearance. I was disappointed, aggrieved even; my earlier suspicions had vanished and only the thought remained that my companion might return no more.

"Ellis! Ellis! Will you not come to me?" I cried for the last time.

A raven that my voice had disturbed from sleep, began to stir in the top of a tree near me; he hopped from twig to twig and flapped his wings. Ellis came not.

I turned back to the house with head hanging. Before me rose black the clump of willows at the brink of my pond, and the light in my study flickered through the trees; flickered a moment and went out, as if it had been the eye of some one watching me who found himself discovered. All of a sudden there was a swift, rushing sound behind me as if the air were cloven, and something seized and lifted me in very much the same way that a hawk pounces upon a chicken. It was Ellis who had swooped upon me thus. I felt her cheek against mine, her arm encircled my body like a girdle, and like a sharply cold breeze her whisper reached

my ear: "I am come." I was startled and delighted at once. We floated along at no great height from the ground.

"Did you not mean to come to-night?" I asked.

"Did you desire me? Do you love me? O you are my very own!"

Ellis's words made me a little uncomfortable. I did not know how to reply.

"They kept me," continued she. "They watched me."

"Who watched you?"

"Where will you go?" asked Ellis, leaving my question unanswered, after her usual fashion.

"Take me to Italy, to that lake—you remember?"

Ellis moved a little away from me and shook her head, denying this. When first I discovered that she had ceased to be transparent, and that her face had also gained coloring; a clear, rosy tint was spread over the mist white. I looked into her eyes and had an uneasy sensation; in these eyes something seemed to stir with the slow, continuous, uncanny motion of a chilled snake that is beginning to return to life under the rays of the sun.

"Ellis," I cried, "who are you? Tell me who are you?"

But Ellis only shrugged her shoulders.

It vexed me. I resolved to have my revenge upon her, and the idea came suddenly to me that she should take me to Paris. "You shall have food enough for your jealousy," I thought. "Ellis," I said aloud, "do great cities terrify you. Paris, for example?"

"No."

"No? Not even the places where it is as light as the Boulevards are?"

"It is not the light of day."

"That is fortunate. You shall take me then to the Boulevard des Italiens."

Ellis threw one end of her wide flowing sleeve over my head. A curious faint smell, like poppies, overpowered me, and everything vanished, light, even consciousness itself. Only the assurance of living remained in some way; nor was there anything disagreeable in the rest.

By and by the odor was withdrawn abruptly as Ellis freed my head from her drapery, and I saw beneath me a mass of buildings closely packed together, brilliant light, motion, bustle—it was Paris on which I looked down.