Beckoning his companion to follow him, the stranger then passed into the room, which was dimly illumined by the flickering light of a taper. Throwing off his mantle, Eckhardt surveyed with a degree of curiosity the apartment and its scanty furnishings. Nothing could be more dreary than the aspect of the place. The richly moulded ceiling was festooned with spiders' webs and in some places had fallen in heaps upon the floor. The glories of Byzantine tapestry had long been obliterated by age and time. The squares of black and white marble with which the chamber was paved were loosened and quaked beneath the foot-steps and the wide and empty fireplace yawned like the mouth of a cavern.
Straining his gaze after the harper who was bending over a couch in a remote corner of the room, Eckhardt was about to join him when Hezilo approached him.
"Would you like to see?" he asked, his eyes full of tears.
Eckhardt bowed gravely, and with gentle foot-steps they approached a bed in the corner of the room, on which there reposed the figure of a girl, lying so still and motionless that she might have been an image of wax. Her luxurious brown hair was spread over the pillow and out of this frame the pinched white face with all its traces of past beauty looked out in pitiful silence. One thin hand was turned palm downward on the coverlet, and as they approached the fingers began to work convulsively.
Hezilo bent over her, and touched her brow with his lips.
"Little one," he said, "do you sleep?"
The girl opened her sightless eyes, and a faint smile, that illumined her face, making it wondrously beautiful, passed over her countenance.
"Not yet," she spoke so low that Eckhardt could scarcely catch the words, "but I shall sleep soon."
He knew what she meant, for in her face was already that look which comes to those who are going away. Hezilo looked down upon her in silence, but even as he did so a change for the worse seemed to come to the sick girl, and they became aware that the end had begun. He tried to force some wine between her lips, but she could not swallow, and now, instead of lying still, she continued tossing her head from side to side. Hezilo was undone. He could do nothing but stand at the head of the bed in mute despair, as he watched the parting soul of his child sob its way out.
"Angiola—Angiola—do not leave me—do not go from me!" the harper cried in heart-rending anguish, kneeling down before the bed of the girl and taking her cold, clammy hands into his own. Impelled by a power he could not resist, Eckhardt knelt and tried to form some words to reach the Most High. But they would not come; he could only feel them, and he rose again and took his stand by the dying girl.