Breathlessly I watched the trembling translucent curtains as a misty image transformed itself on the airy balcony. A slender sylph-like creature formed herself into existence moving through the curtains slowly in the darkness. I could hear her quiet breathing, I could see the sleek and silver chatelaine that hung from her hips past her navel. This was a pretty and potent angel from Heaven, or from principalities, I knew not which. She moved with uncanny grace in the mantic moonlight maneuvering like some practiced purloiner of pelf out of the translucent curtains and around the purple pillowed ivory chair to the antique desk of polished, tainted teak. Her flesh was pale in the moonlight; she seemed like animated marble so perfectly was she formed. Delicate and deft hands opened the old journal on the ancient desk. Fingering through the brittle pages she stopped a moment and I heard her soulful sigh. Then the teeming tension in the room was broken by the nearly silent sobs the appealing apparition gave up in the half light, such ineffable sorrow as is rarely given to any to witness. This nearly moved my pitiless heart to pity, but I laughed a lecherous laugh to echo her sobs and no more did she visit me in all the vastnesses of my dark imperial dreams.