It was not possible to doubt that the phantom figure which had been so close to me during the dark hours of the night was actual flesh and blood.

Yet she was so cold, so cold! Altogether I could not fix my mind to either proposition: that it was a living woman who had held my hand, or a dead body reanimated for the time or the occasion in some strange manner.
The difficulty was too great for me to make up my mind upon it, even had I wanted to.

But, in any case, I did not want to.

This would, no doubt, come in time.

But till then I wished to dream on, as anyone does in a dream which can still be blissful though there be pauses of pain, or ghastliness, or doubt, or terror.
So I closed the window and drew the curtain again, feeling for the first time the cold in which I had stood on the wet marble floor of the terrace when my bare feet began to get warm on the soft carpet.