Gabrielle shook her dear head, and the sweet yearning eyes watched me with a sad disillusionment that I had deserted her, and, I, in the madness of my joy and in the eagerness of my plans, recurred to the artifice of commonplaces, and the flat sophistries of comfort.
I came upon her one morning weeping quietly in her room with her head leaning against the mantel piece, her white slender fingers pressed upon her eyes and the tears slipping through them. I caught her in my arms, and turned her head upon my breast with the real anguish of self-reproach.
"Gabrielle, Gabrielle, what hurts you? You break my heart. Have I been forgetful? O! believe me Gabrielle it will be all well, and if—if—perhaps—I know, you say I have been only thinking of myself. Ah forgive me, Gabrielle; surely you know that I love you from the very bottom of my heart and if you could only see it you would believe."
"Yes," she murmured between sobs that wrung my heart. "Oui Alfred, c'est vrai—but I feel so sorrowful at times, and I am afraid of the great city, and the visions come to me at night and I wake up shaking with strange doubts."
"Why Gabrielle, what do you mean? Visions! You have never told me of that before. What visions?"
It was some time before I could contrive to make her tell me more, and when she finally drew me to a sofa at the window, keeping her face fixed outward on the sweet pageantry of the little gardens on the hill, and the far-away loveliness of the forests, and the shifting radiances of the lowlands, she held me spell-bound with the strange confession. Her voice was at first very low, almost inaudible, but slowly she regained her composure, and the story came from her lips with an unstudied grace and realism that imposed its truthfulness upon its hearer. Indeed my own latent sympathy in nature with that of Gabrielle's, from the first, enthralled me in a trance of confidence.
"Why, Alfred, a year ago I was standing at my bed-side—it was late and the night was dark. I had put out my lamp, and was about to say my prayers, when softly there seemed to steal into the room a light. It came at first from the ceiling of the room, and then it shifted and shone like a phosphorescent ball, or a little cloud of glowing fire half concealed behind a veil. I was not frightened—No, not at all, but I felt a delicious calmness, a wonderful soothing self-surrender to an unseen influence, as if the effluence of some mind controlled me, and—I thought so—I sank slowly to the floor, while the light rose and expanded and grew before my eyes into a shape, a form of flowing lines of light, with shades between them, and the faintest pencillings of a rosy tint ran here and there over it, and then—perhaps then Alfred I had swooned; but there was no fear. It was just like a delicious lapse in unconsciousness into sleep, and with that came voices in my ears—faint, very faint, murmurous, indistinguishable, and then—"
"And then?" I exclaimed, now thoroughly excited myself, and catching Gabrielle's hands, bringing her face to mine, and gazing into her eyes with mute expostulating curiosity.
"I knew nothing more—all vanished, apparition and voices, and I woke up leaning against my bed and bathed in perspiration."