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.”
I stood silent: she had struck me dumb with beauty; she held me dumb with sweetness.
Taking me by the hand, she drew me to the spot of light, and again flashed upon me. An instant she stood there.
“You have grown brown since last I saw you,” she said.
“This is almost the first roof I have been under since you left me,” I replied.