wanted to look at the face of the singer, who, in such music, gave voice to
such a night. We stood still before the window.

In the centre of a room, furnished in the style of Pompeii, and more like
an ancient temple than a modern drawing-room, surrounded by Greek statues,
Etruscan vases, rare plants, and precious stuffs, lighted up by the soft
radiance of two lamps enclosed in crystal globes, a young woman was sitting
at the piano. Her head slightly bowed and her eyes half-closed, she sang an
Italian melody; she sang and smiled, and at the same time her face wore an
expression of gravity, almost of sternness ... a token of perfect rapture!
She smiled ... and Praxiteles' Faun, indolent, youthful as she, effeminate,
and voluptuous, seemed to smile back at her from a corner, under the
branches of an oleander, across the delicate smoke that curled upwards
from a bronze censer on an antique tripod. The beautiful singer was alone.
Spell-bound by the music, her beauty, the splendour and sweet fragrance of
the night, moved to the heart by the picture of this youthful, serene, and
untroubled happiness, I utterly forgot my companion, I forgot the strange
way in which I had become a witness of this life, so remote, so completely
apart from me, and I was on the point of tapping at the window, of
speaking....

I was set trembling all over by a violent shock--just as though I had
touched a galvanic battery. I looked round.... The face of Alice was--for
all its transparency--dark and menacing; there was a dull glow of anger in
her eyes, which were suddenly wide and round....

'Away!' she murmured wrathfully, and again whirling and darkness and
giddiness.... Only this time not the shout of legions, but the voice of the
singer, breaking on a high note, lingered in my ears....