If I lose
her for half a day, all the old feelings, resembling certainties, come
back, that I have only been dreaming--that this appearance cannot be an
actual objective fact of life, since the impossible is impossible.
Seventeen long years, seventeen long years, of madness....
* * * * *
To-morrow I start for Imbros: and whether this girl chooses to follow
me, or whether she stays behind, I will see her from the moment I land
no more.
* * * * *
She must rise very early. I who am now regularly on the palace-roof at
dawn, sometimes from between the pavilion-curtains of the galleries, or
from the steps of the telescope-kiosk, may spy her far down below, a
dainty microscopic figure, generally running about the sward, or gazing
up in wonder at the palace from the lake-edge.
It is now three months since she came with me to Imbros.
I left her the first night in that pale-yellow house with the two green
jalousies facing the beach, where there was everything that she would
need; but I knew that, like all the houses there now, it leaked
profusely, and the next day I went down to the curving stair, cut
through the rock at the back and south of the village, climbed, and half
a mile beyond found that park and villa with gables, which I had noted
from the sea.
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