The bright lights and the music pierced him as with swords.
Once more he saw that apple-tree thick with blossom in the hot sun.

Yet his fancy found grim spells to lay the insolent ghost of life, and death ever at his side whispered that all this light and music and dancing was for but a little while; that those gay rouged faces, so confident in laughing beauty, and all those nimble shapes, were to the eye that had looked beyond life already stark in their coffins, with chin-cloths about their nerveless jaws.

Surely the lover would trip in the shroud that was plainly to be seen from his feet to his lips! Like sudden snow on a summer meadow, a white silence fell from his imagination across that fiddling, jigging, gleaming atmosphere, and everywhere the dead sat around him, watching in a trance strange antics of the grimacing dead.

Curiously, in these moods, he never thought of himself as dead.

Alas! life was too cruel to release him so soon to death and Jenny.
Suddenly the theatre sprang back to life again with the entrance of the prima donna.