Within five minutes' walk of streets in which throngs of people were moving about, the scene which surrounded her was desolate and almost wild.

The unfinished building loomed like a ruin behind her; the rough hewn blocks lay like boulders in a stony desert; the broad gray ice lay like a floor of lustreless iron before her under the uncertain starlight.

Only afar off, high up in the mighty Hradschin, lamps gleamed here and there from the windows, the distant evidences of human life.

All was still.

Even the steely ring of the skates had ceased.
"And so," she continued, presently, "this man's whole life has been a delusion, ever since he began to fancy in the fever of an illness that he loved a certain woman.