That night, I went home in a desperate condition. I told Mamma Valérius, who said, ‘Why, of course, the voice is jealous!’ And that, dear, first revealed to me that I loved you.”
Christine stopped and laid her head on Raoul’s shoulder. They sat like that for a moment, in silence, and they did not see, did not perceive the movement, at a few steps from them, of the creeping shadow of two great black wings, a shadow that came along the roof so near, so near them that it could have stifled them by closing over them.
“The next day,” Christine continued, with a sigh, “I went back to my dressing-room in a very pensive frame of mind. The voice was there, spoke to me with great sadness and told me plainly that, if I must bestow my heart on earth, there was nothing for the voice to do but to go back to Heaven. And it said this with such an accent of human sorrow that I ought then and there to have suspected and begun to believe that I was the victim of my deluded senses. But my faith in the voice, with which the memory of my father was