"How living you are to-day, more living than you have ever been! I see every fold of your dress: see how small the pleats are: you have good pleaters in your world. You have the royal serpent on your forehead; so you had renounced your crown here and accepted it there? I see every line in your face: the charming, childish ones round the mouth—your smile, Enra. I loved it so and I love it now. Enra, Enra, do you know that I love you? You have grown younger, more beautiful. And how is Dio? Is she with you? There, forgive me, I won't... Yes, you are quite living, you could not be more so! And yet I know that you don't exist, that you are my dream.... Goodbye, Enra, this is the last time I see you. I want to escape from Him.... You think I cannot? He is always and everywhere and there is no escaping from Him? ... Well, we shall live and die and see. There is a great deal you don't know, Enra: you are wise like a god, but you are not clever. You remember, you yourself used to say 'wisdom is beyond reason'.... Oh, I nearly forgot: here is the ring, do you remember it? Take it as a keepsake.... A-ah, you laugh! You understand? Yes, I want to test you: if the ring is not on my finger when I wake, it will mean that you exist, and if it is on my finger—you don't exist. Well, will you take it?"
His guest stretched out his hand to him—a hand he knew so well that he would have recognized it among a thousand—a long, slender, beautiful hand, with the same childishly piteous expression as the face, with blue veins under the brown skin, so real that warm, red blood seemed to be flowing in them. The middle finger was slightly apart from the others so that the ring could be slipped on more easily and the nail on it was a dark rosy colour with a white arch at the bottom.
"If I touch this hand I will die of horror," Merira thought and an icy shiver ran down his back. Yet he did touch it, put the ring on the middle finger, felt the firm bone under the soft flesh and he felt no horror but only a desire to know what it was, who it was.
He suddenly clasped the hand: it was soft, dry, warm—a real, living hand!
"You are real! You are real! I adjure you by the living God, tell me, are you real?" he cried in such a voice as though his soul left his body with that cry.
Regaining consciousness he saw an empty chair in front of him and Issachar kneeling beside it. Looking at the chair he trembled so violently that Merira heard his teeth chattering.
"What has frightened you so?"
Issachar said nothing and went on staring at the chair, his teeth chattering.
"He has been here," he whispered at last, turning to Merira.
"Who?"