How perfectly serene and happy she looked! I fully expected her to open her lips and speak. When this did not happen, the sense of my awful loss surged back into my brain, seeming almost to take my reason; but another quiet hour by the side of my darling partially restored me.
It was midnight. A perfect storm of grief had just spent itself and left me weak and weary. I threw myself, with a heavy sigh, into the depth of the lounging chair.
Presently I slept. What was that? A bit of beautiful yellow light floated gracefully above Olga's head. With a fast-beating heart I watched it from my resting place. It grew in size, and increased in height, gradually assuming the form of my darling, a complete counterpart of the one lying before me in the soft blue gown.
The face, the golden braids, the fingers, and the wedding ring were all there, completed by a smile so heavenly that I gazed as one transfixed.
Could this, then, be Olga, and not a stray beam of light which had struggled through the curtains?
"Olga!" I cried, stretching out my arms toward her in an ecstasy of gladness.
"Dear Victor! Have no fear. I will come again." The voice seemed like Olga's and as full of love as ever.
With that the beautiful yellow light began slowly to fade, the form of my beloved melted into a haze which drifted gradually upward and out of sight. Then I awoke.
Weeks passed, during which the fall rains set in, and I was working as hard as ever; not so much in a feverish desire for the gold I was taking out of the ground, but because the work helped me to forget my sorrow. I did not cease to think hourly of Olga, but I wished to put behind me the shock of her sudden leave-taking, and remember the fact that she was still in memory mine, that she was watching over me and would visit me in my dreams.
My all-absorbing love for her I could not—did not wish to put away from me. I had loved her so devotedly that I envied the passing breeze which played among the loose locks of the hair on her forehead. I had envied the dust of the road as it clung to her feet because it could remain so near to her; and I longed to become the atmosphere she breathed, that I might live a part of her very physical being This sort of love never dies, because it is part of one's constitution and sub-consciousness, and cannot be eradicated.