"'What is the matter with you?' asked Adolphus of his brother, as soon as they were alone.
"'I am sad and happy at the same time; sad because I am going to leave you alone for a short time; but very happy because I go at last to rejoin her, and for this time not again to leave her!'
"'Explain yourself; why do you leave us?'
"'Listen: for that you may understand what is going to happen here this night, it is necessary that you should know what I have felt and suffered during the past three years.'
"Albert then told him of all that which I have just described to you; of his love for Flaminia, of his struggles, and of his victory, over himself; and Adolphus, who already knew through his wife of what Flaminia had suffered, saw with astonishment that all which had been felt by the one had also been by the other, in the same degree and at the same moment. Never had the most profound sympathy established between two beings a more complete identity of sensations and thoughts; near or separated, their two existences had formed but a single life, as their two souls seemed to form but a single soul. When Albert had finished his recital, he added:
"'"If I die first, I shall come to seek you!" Flaminia had told me, and now Flaminia has just died. Do not ask me how I know it, for I am ignorant myself of the reason; but I do know it. I have followed, moment by moment, the progress of her death; at the end I have felt her die, and now I await her coming. In a few instants more she will be here, and we shall depart together for that blessed home where nothing can again oppose itself to our eternal union. It seems to me that already I feel my soul disengaging itself from its bonds; I no longer regard the sufferings that I have endured, except with that sentiment of thankfulness and joy which one feels at the recollection of perils that have been overcome; my past sufferings have no longer their sting, my tears no longer their bitterness! At the solemn moment when I am about to quit a life that has been most painful in its trials for the happy life of triumph, I have wished to have you by my side, that I might say to you my last farewell in this world, and press for a last time your hand before going to await you in eternity.' I leave you to think, my dear Frederick, what must have been the astonishment of Adolphus at receiving this strange confidence.
"'I have too much confidence in the firmness of your reason,' he answered to his brother after a short silence, 'to believe that it has become weakened, were it only for a moment; but do you not fear to have been the victim of some mental illusion, and to have taken for a reality that which was in reality only the dream of your heart exalted by sadness and solitude?'
"'I understand your incredulity,' answered Albert, 'for I have myself shared in it. Each time that the recollection of that promise presented itself to my memory, my reason revolted against such an evident impossibility; the soul cannot again appear in this world once that it has quitted it, thought I, and yet I counted on the premise even while I disbelieved its possibility. Only an hour ago, I yet doubted, but now that doubt has passed away, since the moment when her dying voice sounded in my ears uttering her last words: "You have waited for me; I am here!" Then I understood that it was not merely the strong desire of a soul overexcited by the desire to be reunited to the second half of itself that I felt, but that it was really a mysterious warning; and the accomplishment of a promise that God himself had blessed, and that he permitted to be fulfilled.'
"'But how to explain this miracle?'