Then the tamer's heart beats loud, his chest heaves, his brows are furrowed. Even then, in the instant that still separates him from triumph or destruction, the thought of his sleeping child or of his watching wife darts through his brain. But the struggle has begun and there is no escape. One of two things must happen: he must overcome or he must die. To draw back, to let his glance waver, to show so much as the least sign of fear, is death. The moment is supreme, and he knows it.

Unorna grasped the arms of her chair as though seeking for physical support in her extremity. She could not yield. Before her eyes arose a vision unlike the reality in all its respects. She saw an older face, a taller figure, a look of deeper thought between her and the angry man who was trying to conquer her resistance with a glance. Between her and her mistake the image of what should be stood out, bright, vivid, and strong. A new conviction had taken the place of the old, a real passion was flaming upon the altar whereon she had fed with dreams the semblance of a sacred fire.

"You do not really love me," she said softly.

Israel Kafka started, as a man who is struck unawares. The monstrous untruth which filled the words broke down his guard, sudden tears veiled the penetrating sharpness of his gaze, and his hand trembled.

"I do not love you? I! Unorna—Unorna!"

The first words broke from him in a cry of horror and stupefaction. But her name, when he spoke it, sounded as the death moan of a young wild animal wounded beyond all power to turn at bay.

He moved unsteadily and laid hold of the tall chair in which she sat. He was behind her now, standing, but bending down so that his forehead pressed his fingers. He could not bear to look upon her hair, still less upon her face. Even his hands were white and bloodless. Unorna could hear his quick breathing just above her shoulder. She sat quite still, and her lips were smiling, though her brow was thoughtful and almost sad. She knew that the struggle was over and that she had gained the mastery, though the price of victory might be a broken heart.

"You thought I was jesting," she said in a low voice, looking before her into the deep foliage, but knowing that her softest whisper would reach him. "But there was no jest in what I said—nor any unkindness in what I meant, though it is all my fault. But that is true—you never loved me as I would be loved."

"Unorna——"

"No, I am not unkind. Your love is young, fierce, inconstant; half terrible, half boyish, aflame to-day, asleep to-morrow, ready to turn into hatred at one moment, to melt into tears at the next, intermittent, unstable as water, fleeting as a cloud's shadow on the mountain side—"

"It pleased you once," said Israel Kafka in broken tones. "It is not less love because you are weary of it, and of me."

"Weary, you say? No, not weary—and very truly not of you. You will believe that to-day, to-morrow, you will still try to force life into your belief—and then it will be dead and gone like all thoughts which have never entered into the shapes of reality. We have not loved each other. We have but fancied that it would be sweet to love, and the knife of truth has parted the web of our dreams, keenly, in the midst, so that we see before us what is, though the ghost of what might have been is yet lingering near."

"Who wove that web, Unorna? You, or I?" He lifted his heavy eyes and gazed at her coiled hair.

"What matters it whether it was your doing or mine? But we wove it together—and together we must see the truth."

"If this is true, there is no more 'together' for you and me."

"We may yet glean friendship in the fields where love has grown."

"Friendship! The very word is a wound! Friendship! The very dregs and lees of the wine of life! Friendship! The sour drainings of the heart's cup, left to moisten the lips of the damned when the blessed have drunk their fill! I hate the word, as I hate the thought!"

Unorna sighed, partly, perhaps, that he might hear the sigh, and put upon it an interpretation soothing to his vanity, but partly, too, from a sincere regret that he should need to suffer as he was evidently suffering. She had half believed that she loved him, and she owed him pity. Women's hearts pay such debts unwillingly, but they do pay them, nevertheless. She wished that she had never set eyes upon Israel Kafka; she wished that she might never see him again; even his death would hardly have cost her a pang, and yet she was sorry for him. Diana, the huntress, shot her arrows with unfailing aim; Diana, the goddess, may have sighed and shed one bright immortal tear, as she looked into the fast-glazing eyes of the dying stag—may not Diana, the maiden, have felt a touch of human sympathy and pain as she listened to the deep note of her hounds baying on poor Actaeon's track! No one is all bad, or all good. No woman is all earthly, nor any goddess all divine.

"I am sorry," said Unorna. "You will not understand——"

"I have understood enough. I have understood that a woman can have two faces and two hearts, two minds, two souls; it is enough, my understanding need go no farther. You sighed before you spoke. It was not for me; it was for yourself. You never felt pain or sorrow for another."

He was trying hard to grow cold and to find cold words to say, which might lead her to believe him stronger than he was and able to master his grief. But he was too young, too hot, too changeable for such a part. Moreover, in his first violent outbreak Unorna had dominated him, and he could not now regain the advantage.

"You are wrong, Israel Kafka. You would make me less than human. If I sighed, it was indeed for you. See—I confess that I have done you wrong, not in deeds, but in letting you hope. Truly, I myself have hoped also. I have thought that the star of love was trembling just below the east, and that you and I might be one to another—what we cannot be now. My wisdom has failed me, my sight has been deceived. Am I the only woman in this world who has been mistaken? Can you not forgive? If I had promised, if I had said one word—and yet, you are right, too, for I have let you think in earnest what has been but a passing dream of my own thoughts. It was all wrong; it was all my fault. There, lay your hand in mine and say that you forgive, as I ask forgiveness."

He was still standing behind her, leaning against the back of her chair. Without looking round she raised her hand above her shoulder as though seeking for his. But he would not take it.

"Is it so hard?" she asked softly. "Is it even harder for you to give than for me to ask? Shall we part like this—not to meet again—each bearing a wound, when both might be whole? Can you not say the word?"

"What is it to you whether I forgive you or not?"

"Since I ask it, believe that it is much to me," she answered, slowly turning her head until, without catching sight of his face, she could just see where his fingers were resting on her chair. Then, over her shoulder, she touched them, and drew them to her cheek. He made no resistance.

"Shall we part without one kind thought?" Her voice was softer still and so low and sweet that it seemed as though the words were spoken in the ripple of the tiny fountain. There was magic in the place, in the air, in the sounds, above all in the fair woman's touch.

"Is this friendship?" asked Kafka. Then he sank upon his knees beside her, and looked up into her face.

"It is friendship; yes—why not? Am I like other women?"

"Then why need there be any parting?"

"If you will be my friend there need be none. You have forgiven me now—I see it in your eyes. Is it not true?"

He was at her feet, passive at last under the superior power which he had never been able to resist. Unorna's fascination was upon him, and he could only echo her words, as he would have executed her slightest command, without consciousness of free will or individual thought. It was enough that for one moment his anger should cease to give life to his resistance; it was sufficient that Unorna should touch him thus, and speak softly, his eyelids quivered and his look became fixed, his strength was absorbed in hers and incapable of acting except under her direction. So long as she might please the spell would endure.

"Sit beside me now, and let us talk," she said.

Like a man in a dream, he rose and sat down near her.

Unorna laughed, and there was something in the tone that was not good to hear. A moment earlier it would have wounded Israel Kafka to the quick and brought the hot, angry blood to his face. Now he laughed with her, vacantly, as though not knowing the cause of his mirth.

"You are only my slave, after all," said Unorna scornfully.

"I am only your slave, after all," he repeated.

"I could touch you with my hand and you would hate me, and forget that you ever loved me."

This time the man was silent. There was a contraction of pain in his face, as though a violent mental struggle were going on within him. Unorna tapped the pavement impatiently with her foot and bent her brows.

"You would hate me and forget that you ever loved me," she repeated, dwelling on each word as though to impress it on his consciousness. "Say it. I order you."

The contraction of his features disappeared.

"I should hate you and forget that I ever loved you," he said slowly.

"You never loved me."

"I never loved you."

Again Unorna laughed, and he joined in her laughter, unintelligently, as he had done before. She leaned back in her seat, and her face grew grave. Israel Kafka sat motionless in his chair, staring at her with unwinking eyes. But his gaze did not disturb her. There was no more meaning in it than in the expression of a marble statue, far less than in that of a painted portrait. Yet the man was alive and in the full strength of his magnificent youth, supple, active, fierce by nature, able to have killed her with his hands in the struggle of a moment. Yet she knew that without a word from her he could neither turn his head nor move in his seat.

For a long time Unorna was absorbed in her meditations. Again and again the vision of a newer happiness took shape and colour before her, so clearly and vividly that she could have clasped it and held it and believed in its reality, as she had done before Israel Kafka had entered. But there was a doubt now, which constantly arose between her and it, the dark and shapeless shadow of a reasoning she hated and yet knew to be strong.

"I must ask him," she said unconsciously.

"You must ask him," repeated Israel Kafka from his seat.

For the third time Unorna laughed aloud as she heard the echo of her own words.

"Whom shall I ask?" she inquired contemptuously, as she rose to her feet.

The dull, glassy eyes sought hers in painful perplexity, following her face as she moved.

"I do not know," answered the powerless man.

Unorna came close to him and laid her hand upon his head.

"Sleep, until I wake you," she said.

The eyelids drooped and closed at her command, and instantly the man's breathing became heavy and regular. Unorna's full lips curled as she looked down at him.

"And you would be my master!" she exclaimed.

Then she turned and disappeared among the plants, leaving him alone.



CHAPTER V

Unorna passed through a corridor which was, indeed, only a long balcony covered in with arches and closed with windows against the outer air. At the farther end three steps descended to a dark door, through the thickness of a massive wall, showing that at this point Unorna's house had at some former time been joined with another building beyond, with which it thus formed one habitation. Unorna paused, holding the key as though hesitating whether she should put it into the lock. It was evident that much depended upon her decision, for her face expressed the anxiety she felt. Once she turned away, as though to abandon her intention, hesitated, and then, with an impatient frown, opened the door and went in. She passed through a small, well-lighted vestibule and entered the room beyond.

The apartment was furnished with luxury, but a stranger would have received an oddly disquieting impression of the whole at a first glance. There was everything in the place which is considered necessary for a bedroom, and everything was perfect of its kind, spotless and dustless, and carefully arranged in order. But almost everything was of an unusual and unfamiliar shape, as though designed for some especial reason to remain in equilibrium in any possible position, and to be moved from place to place with the smallest imaginable physical effort. The carved bedstead was fitted with wheels which did not touch the ground, and levers so placed as to be within the reach of a person lying in it. The tables were each supported at one end only by one strong column, fixed to a heavy base set on broad rollers, so that the board could be run across a bed or a lounge with the greatest ease. There was but one chair made like ordinary chairs; the rest were so constructed that the least motion of the occupant must be accompanied by a corresponding change of position of the back and arms, and some of them bore a curious resemblance to a surgeon's operating table, having attachments of silver-plated metal at many points, of which the object was not immediately evident. Before a closed door a sort of wheeled conveyance, partaking of the nature of a chair and of a perambulator, stood upon polished rails, which disappeared under the door itself, showing that the thing was intended to be moved from one room to another in a certain way and in a fixed line. The rails, had the door been opened, would have been seen to descend upon the other side by a gentle inclined plane into the centre of a huge marble basin, and the contrivance thus made it possible to wheel a person into a bath and out again without necessitating the slightest effort or change of position in the body. In the bedroom the windows were arranged so that the light and air could be regulated to a nicety. The walls were covered with fine basket work, apparently adapted in panels; but these panels were in reality movable trays, as it were, forming shallow boxes fitted with closely-woven wicker covers, and filled with charcoal and other porous substances intended to absorb the impurities of the air, and thus easily changed and renewed from time to time. Immediately beneath the ceiling were placed delicate glass globes of various soft colours, with silken shades, movable from below by means of brass rods and handles. In the ceiling itself there were large ventilators, easily regulated as might be required, and there was a curious arrangement of rails and wheels from which depended a sort of swing, apparently adapted for moving a person or a weight to different parts of the room without touching the floor. In one of the lounges, not far from the window, lay a colossal old man, wrapped in a loose robe of warm white stuff, and fast asleep.

He was a very old man, so old, indeed, as to make it hard to guess his age from his face and his hands, the only parts visible as he lay at rest, the vast body and limbs lying motionless under his garment, as beneath a heavy white pall. He could not be less than a hundred years old, but how much older than that he might really be, it was impossible to say. What might be called the waxen period had set in, and the high colourless features seemed to be modelled in that soft, semi-transparent material. The time had come when the stern furrows of age had broken up into countless minutely-traced lines, so close and fine as to seem a part of the texture of the skin, mere shadings, evenly distributed throughout, and no longer affecting the expression of the face as the deep wrinkles had done in former days; at threescore and ten, at fourscore, and even at ninety years. The century that had passed had taken with it its marks and scars, leaving the great features in their original purity of design, lean, smooth, and clearly defined. That last change in living man is rare enough, but when once seen is not to be forgotten. There is something in the faces of the very, very old which hardly suggests age at all, but rather the vague possibility of a returning prime. Only the hands tell the tale, with their huge, shining, fleshless joints, their shadowy hollows, and their unnatural yellow nails.

The old man lay quite still, breathing softly through his snowy beard. Unorna came to his side. There was something of wonder and admiration in her own eyes as she stood there gazing upon the face which other generations of men and women, all long dead, had looked upon and known. The secret of life and death was before her each day when she entered that room, and on the very verge of solution. The wisdom hardly gained in many lands was striving with all its concentrated power to preserve that life; the rare and subtle gifts which she herself possessed were daily exercised to their full in the suggestion of vitality; the most elaborate inventions of skilled mechanicians were employed in reducing the labour of living to the lowest conceivable degree of effort. The great experiment was being tried. What Keyork Arabian described as the embalming of a man still alive was being attempted. And he lived. For years they had watched him and tended him, and looked critically for the least signs of a diminution or an augmentation in his strength. They knew that he was now in his one hundred and seventh year, and yet he lived and was no weaker. Was there a limit; or was there not, since the destruction of the tissues was arrested beyond doubt, so far as the most minute tests could show? Might there not be, in the slow oscillations of nature, a degree of decay, on this side of death, from which a return should be possible, provided that the critical moment were passed in a state of sleep and under perfect conditions? How do we know that all men must die? We suppose the statement to be true by induction, from the undoubted fact that men have hitherto died within a certain limit of age. By induction, too, our fathers, our grandfathers, knew that it was impossible for man to traverse the earth faster than at the full speed of a galloping horse. After several thousand years of experience that piece of knowledge, which seemed to be singularly certain, was suddenly proved to be the grossest ignorance by a man who had been in the habit of playing with a tea-kettle when a boy. We ourselves, not very long ago, knew positively, as all men had known since the beginning of the world, that it was quite impossible to converse with a friend at a distance beyond the carrying power of a speaking trumpet. To-day, a boy who does not know that one may talk very agreeably with a friend a thousand miles away is an ignoramus; and experimenters whisper among themselves that, if the undulatory theory of light have any foundation, there is no real reason why we may not see that same friend at that same distance, as well as talk with him. Ten years ago we were quite sure that it was beyond the bounds of natural possibility to produce a bad burn upon the human body by touching the flesh with a bit of cardboard or a common lead pencil. Now we know with equal certainty that if upon one arm of a hypnotised patient we impress a letter of the alphabet cut out of wood, telling him that it is red-hot iron, the shape of the letter will on the following day be found on a raw and painful wound not only in the place we selected but on the other arm, in the exactly corresponding spot, and reversed as though seen in a looking-glass; and we very justly consider that a physician who does not know this and similar facts is dangerously behind the times, since the knowledge is open to all. The inductive reasoning of many thousands of years has been knocked to pieces in the last century by a few dozen men who have reasoned little but attempted much. It would be rash to assert that bodily death may not some day, and under certain conditions, be altogether escaped. It is nonsense to pretend that human life may not possibly, and before long, be enormously prolonged, and that by some shorter cut to longevity than temperance and sanitation. No man can say that it will, but no man of average intelligence can now deny that it may.

Unorna had hesitated at the door, and she hesitated now. It was in her power, and in hers only, to wake the hoary giant, or at least to modify his perpetual sleep so far as to obtain from him answers to her questions. It would be an easy matter to lay one hand upon his brow, bidding him see and speak—how easy, she alone knew. But on the other hand, to disturb his slumber was to interfere with the continuity of the great experiment, to break through a rule lately made, to incur the risk of an accident, if not of death itself.

She drew back at the thought, as though fearing to startle him, and then she smiled at her own nervousness. To wake him she must exercise her will. There was no danger of his ever being roused by any sound or touch not proceeding from herself. The crash of thunder had no reverberation for his ears, the explosion of a cannon would not have penetrated into his lethargy. She might touch him, move him, even speak to him, but unless she laid her hand upon his waxen forehead and bid him feel and hear, he would be as unconscious as the dead. She returned to his side and gazed into his placid face. Strange faculties were asleep in that ancient brain, and strange wisdom was stored there, gathered from many sources long ago, and treasured unconsciously by the memory to be recalled at her command.

The man had been a failure in his day, a scholar, a student, a searcher after great secrets, a wanderer in the labyrinths of higher thought. He had been a failure and had starved, as failures must, in order that vulgar success may fatten and grow healthy. He had outlived the few that had been dear to him, he had outlived the power to feed on thought, he had outlived generations of men, and cycles of changes, and yet there had been life left in the huge gaunt limbs and sight in the sunken eyes. Then he had outlived pride itself, and the ancient scholar had begged his bread. In his hundredth year he had leaned for rest against Unorna's door, and she had taken him in and cared for him, and since that time she had preserved his life. For his history was known in the ancient city, and it was said that he had possessed great wisdom in his day. Unorna knew that this wisdom could be hers if she could keep alive the spark of life, and that she could employ his own learning to that end. Already she had much experience of her powers, and knew that if she once had the mastery of the old man's free will he must obey her fatally and unresistingly. Then she conceived the idea of embalming, as it were, the living being, in a perpetual hypnotic lethargy, from whence she recalled him from time to time to an intermediate state, in which she caused him to do mechanically all those things which she judged necessary to prolong life.

Seeing her success from the first, she had begun to fancy that the present condition of things might be made to continue indefinitely. Since death was to-day no nearer than it had been seven years ago, there was no reason why it might not be guarded against during seven years more, and if during seven, why not during ten, twenty, fifty? She had for a helper a physician of consummate practical skill—a man whose interest in the result of the trial was, if anything, more keen than her own; a friend, above all, whom she believed she might trust, and who appeared to trust her.

But in the course of their great experiment they had together made rules by which they had mutually agreed to be bound. They had of late determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity. The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so carefully preserving. They hoped and believed that the grand crisis was at hand, and that, if the body did not now lose strength and vitality for a considerable time, both would slowly though surely increase, in consequence of the means they were using to instill new blood into the system. But the period was supreme, and to interfere in any way with the progress of the experiment was to run a risk of which the whole extent could only be realised by Unorna and her companion.

She hesitated therefore, well knowing that her ally would oppose her intention with all his might, and dreading his anger, bold as she was, almost as much as she feared the danger to the old man's life. On the other hand, she had a motive which the physician could not have, and which, as she was aware, he would have despised and condemned. She had a question to ask, which she considered of vital importance to herself, to which she firmly believed that the true answer would be given, and which, in her womanly impetuosity and impatience, she could not bear to leave unasked until the morrow, much less until months should have passed away. Two very powerful incentives were at work, two of the very strongest which have influence with mankind, love and a superstitious belief in an especial destiny of happiness, at the present moment on the very verge of realisation.

She believed profoundly in herself and in the suggestions of her own imagination. So fixed and unalterable was that belief that it amounted to positive knowledge, so far as it constituted a motive of action. In her strange youth wild dreams had possessed her, and some of them, often dreamed again, had become realities to her now. Her powers were natural, those gifts which from time to time are seen in men and women, which are alternately scoffed at as impostures, or accepted as facts, but which are never understood either by their possessor or by those who witness the results. She had from childhood the power to charm with eye and hand all living things, the fascination which takes hold of the consciousness through sight and touch and word, and lulls it to sleep. It was witchery, and she was called a witch. In earlier centuries her hideous fate would have been sealed from the first day when, under her childish gaze, a wolf that had been taken alive in the Bohemian forest crawled fawning to her feet, at the full length of its chain, and laid its savage head under her hand, and closed its bloodshot eyes and slept before her. Those who had seen had taken her and taught her how to use what she possessed according to their own shadowy beliefs and dim traditions of the half-forgotten magic in a distant land. They had filled her heart with longings and her brain with dreams, and she had grown up to believe that one day love would come suddenly upon her and bear her away through the enchanted gates of the earthly paradise; once only that love would come, and the supreme danger of her life would be that she should not know it when it was at hand.

And now she knew that she loved, for the place of her fondness for the one man had been taken by her passion for the other, and she felt without reasoning, where, before, she had tried to reason herself into feeling. The moment had come. She had seen the man in whom her happiness was to be, the time was short, the danger great if she should not grasp what her destiny would offer her but once. Had the Wanderer been by her side, she would have needed to ask no question, she would have known and been satisfied. But hours must pass before she could see him again, and every minute spent without him grew more full of anxiety and disturbing passion than the last. The wild love-blossom that springs into existence in a single moment has elements which do not enter into the gentler being of that other love which is sown in indifference, and which grows up in slowly increasing interest, tended and refreshed in the pleasant intercourse of close acquaintance, to bud and bloom at last as a mild-scented garden flower. Love at first sight is impatient, passionate, ruthless, cruel, as the year would be, if from the calendar of the season the months of slow transition were struck out; if the raging heat of August followed in one day upon the wild tempests of the winter; if the fruit of the vine but yesterday in leaf grew rich and black to-day, to be churned to foam to-morrow under the feet of the laughing wine treaders.

Unorna felt that the day would be intolerable if she could not hear from other lips the promise of a predestined happiness. She was not really in doubt, but she was under the imperious impulse of a passion which must needs find some response, even in the useless confirmation of its reality uttered by an indifferent person—the spirit of a mighty cry seeking its own echo in the echoless, flat waste of the Great Desert.

Then, too, she placed a sincere faith in the old man's answers to her questions, regardless of the matter inquired into. She believed that in the mysterious condition between sleep and waking which she could command, the knowledge of things to be was with him as certainly as the memory of what had been and of what was even now passing in the outer world. To her, the one direction of the faculty seemed no less possible than the others, though she had not yet attained alone to the vision of the future. Hitherto the old man's utterances had been fulfilled to the letter. More than once, as Keyork Arabian had hinted, she had consulted his second sight in preference to her own, and she had not been deceived. His greater learning and his vast experience lent to his sayings something divine in her eyes; she looked upon him as the Pythoness of Delphi looked upon the divinity of her inspiration.

The irresistible longing to hear the passionate pleadings of her own heart solemnly confirmed by the voice in which she trusted overcame at last every obstacle. Unorna bent over the sleeper, looking earnestly into his face, and she laid one hand upon his brow.

"You hear me," she said, slowly and distinctly. "You are conscious of thought, and you see into the future."

The massive head stirred, the long limbs moved uneasily under the white robe, the enormous, bony hands contracted, and in the cavernous eyes the great lids were slowly lifted. A dull stare met her look.

"Is it he?" she asked, speaking more quickly in spite of herself. "Is it he at last?"

There was no answer. The lips did not part, there was not even the attempt to speak. She had been sure that the one word would be spoken unhesitatingly, and the silence startled her and brought back the doubt which she had half forgotten.

"You must answer my question. I command you to answer me. Is it he?"

"You must tell me more before I can answer."

The words came in a feeble piping voice, strangely out of keeping with the colossal frame and imposing features.

Unorna's face was clouded, and the ready gleam of anger flashed in her eyes as it ever did at the smallest opposition to her will.

"Can you not see him?" she asked impatiently.

"I cannot see him unless you lead me to him and tell me where he is."

"Where are you?"

"In your mind."

"And what are you?"

"I am the image in your eyes."

"There is another man in my mind," said Unorna. "I command you to see him."

"I see him. He is tall, pale, noble, suffering. You love him."

"Is it he who shall be my life and my death? Is it he who shall love me as other women are not loved?"

The weak voice was still for a moment, and the face seemed covered with a veil of perplexity.

"I see with your eyes," said the old man at last.

"And I command you to see into the future with your own!" cried Unorna, concentrating her terrible will as she grew more impatient.

There was an evident struggle in the giant's mind, an effort to obey which failed to break down an obstacle. She bent over him eagerly and her whole consciousness was centered in the words she desired him to speak.

Suddenly the features relaxed into an expression of rest and satisfaction. There was something unearthly in the sudden smile that flickered over the old waxen face—it was as strange and unnatural as though the cold marble effigy upon a sepulchre had laughed aloud in the gloom of an empty church.

"I see. He will love you," said the tremulous tones.

"Then it is he?"

"It is he."

With a suppressed cry of triumph Unorna lifted her head and stood upright. Then she started violently and grew very pale.

"You have probably killed him and spoiled everything," said a rich bass voice at her elbow—the very sub-bass of all possible voices.

Keyork Arabian was beside her. In her intense excitement she had not heard him enter the room, and he had surprised her at once in the breaking of their joint convention and in the revelation of her secret. If Unorna could be said to know the meaning of the word fear in any degree whatsoever, it was in relation to Keyork Arabian, the man who during the last few years had been her helper and associate in the great experiment. Of all men she had known in her life, he was the only one whom she felt to be beyond the influence of her powers, the only one whom she felt that she could not charm by word, or touch, or look. The odd shape of his head, she fancied, figured the outline and proportions of his intelligence, which was, as it were, pyramidal, standing upon a base so broad and firm as to place the centre of its ponderous gravity far beyond her reach to disturb. There was certainly no other being of material reality that could have made Unorna start and turn pale by its inopportune appearance.

"The best thing you can do is to put him to sleep at once," said the little man. "You can be angry afterwards, and, I thank heaven, so can I—and shall."

"Forget," said Unorna, once more laying her hand upon the waxen brow. "Let it be as though I had not spoken with you. Drink, in your sleep, of the fountain of life, take new strength into your body and new blood into your heart. Live, and when I next wake you be younger by as many months as there shall pass hours till then. Sleep."

A low sigh trembled in the hoary beard. The eyelids drooped over the sunken eyes, there was a slight motion of the limbs, and all was still, save for the soft and regular breathing.

"The united patience of the seven archangels, coupled with that of Job and Simon Stylites, would not survive your acquaintance for a day," observed Keyork Arabian.

"Is he mine or yours?" Unorna asked, turning to him and pointing to the sleeper.

She was quite ready to face her companion after the first shock of his unexpected appearance. His small blue eyes sparkled angrily.

"I am not versed in the law concerning real estate in human kind in the Kingdom of Bohemia," he answered. "You may have property in a couple of hundredweight, more or less, of old bones rather the worse for the wear and tear of a century, but I certainly have some ownership in the life. Without me, you would have been the possessor of a remarkably fine skeleton by this time—and of nothing more."

As he spoke, his extraordinary voice ran over half a dozen notes of portentous depth, like the opening of a fugue on the pedals of an organ. Unorna laughed scornfully.

"He is mine, Keyork Arabian, alive or dead. If the experiment fails, and he dies, the loss is mine, not yours. Moreover, what I have done is done, and I will neither submit to your reproaches nor listen to your upbraidings. Is that enough?"

"Of its kind, quite. I will build an altar to Ingratitude, we will bury our friend beneath the shrine, and you shall serve in the temple. You could deify all the cardinal sins if you would only give your attention to the subject, merely by the monstrously imposing proportions you would know how to give them."

"Does it ease you to make such an amazing noise?" inquired Unorna, raising her eyebrows.

"Immensely. Our friend cannot hear it, and you can. You dare to tell me that if he dies you are the only loser. Do fifty years of study count for nothing? Look at me. I am an old man, and unless I find the secret of life here, in this very room, before many years are over, I must die—die, do you understand? Do you know what it means to die? How can you comprehend that word—you girl, you child, you thing of five and twenty summers!"

"It was to be supposed that your own fears were at the root of your anger," observed Unorna, sitting down upon her chair and calmly folding her hands as though to wait until the storm should pass over.

"Is there anything at the root of anything except Self? You moth, you butterfly, you thread of floating gossamer! How can you understand the incalculable value of Self—of that which is all to me and nothing to you, or which, being yours, is everything to you and to me nothing? You are so young—you still believe in things, and interests, and good and evil, and love and hate, truth and falsehood, and a hundred notions which are not facts, but only contrasts between one self and another! What were you doing here when I found you playing with life and death, perhaps with my life, for a gipsy trick, in the crazy delusion that this old parcel of humanity can see the shadows of things which are not yet? I saw, I heard. How could he answer anything save that which was in your own mind, when you were forcing him with your words and your eyes to make a reply of some sort, or perish? Ah! You see now. You understand now. I have opened your eyes a little. Why did he hesitate, and suffer? Because you asked that to which he knew there was no answer. And you tortured him with your will until his individuality fell into yours, and spoke your words."

Unorna's head sank a little and she covered her eyes. The truth of what he said flashed upon her suddenly and unexpectedly, bringing with it the doubt which had left her at the moment when the sleeper had spoken. She could not hide her discomfiture and Keyork Arabian saw his advantage.

"And for what?" he asked, beginning to pace the broad room. "To know whether a man will love you or not! You seem to have forgotten what you are. Is not such a poor and foolish thing as love at the command of those who can say to the soul, be this, or be that, and who are obeyed? Have you found a second Keyork Arabian, over whom your eyes have no power—neither the one nor the other?"

He laughed rather brutally at the thought of her greatest physical peculiarity, but then suddenly stopped short. She had lifted her face and those same eyes were fastened upon him, the black and the gray, in a look so savage and fierce that even he was checked, if not startled.

"They are certainly very remarkable eyes," he said, more calmly, and with a certain uneasiness which Unorna did not notice. "I wonder whom you have found who is able to look you in the face without losing himself. I suppose it can hardly be my fascinating self whom you wish to enthrall," he added, conscious after a moment's trial that he was proof against her influence.

"Hardly," answered Unorna, with a bitter laugh.

"If I were the happy man you would not need that means of bringing me to your feet. It is a pity that you do not want me. We should make a very happy couple. But there is much against me. I am an old man, Unorna. My figure was never of divine proportions, and as for my face, Nature made it against her will. I know all that—and yet, I was young once, and eloquent. I could make love then—I believe that I could still if it would amuse you."

"Try it," said Unorna, who, like most people, could not long be angry with the gnome-like little sage.



CHAPTER VI

"I could make love—yes, and since you tell me to try, I will."

He came and stood before her, straightening his diminutive figure in a comical fashion as though he were imitating a soldier on parade.

"In the first place," he said, "in order to appreciate my skill, you should realise the immense disadvantages under which I labour. I am a dwarf, my dear Unorna. In the presence of that kingly wreck of a Homeric man"—he pointed to the sleeper beside them—"I am a Thersites, if not a pigmy. To have much chance of success I should ask you to close your eyes, and to imagine that my stature matches my voice. That gift at least, I flatter myself, would have been appreciated on the plains of Troy. But in other respects I resemble neither the long-haired Greeks nor the trousered Trojans. I am old and hideous, and in outward appearance I am as like Socrates as in inward disposition I am totally different from him. Admit, since I admit it, that I am the ugliest and smallest man of your acquaintance."

"It is not to be denied," said Unorna with a smile.

"The admission will make the performance so much the more interesting. And now, as the conjurer says when he begins, observe that there is no deception. That is the figure of speech called lying, because there is to be nothing but deception from beginning to end. Did you ever consider the nature of a lie, Unorna? It is a very interesting subject."

"I thought you were going to make love to me."

"True; how easily one forgets those little things! And yet no woman ever forgave a man who forgot to make love when she expected him to do so. For a woman, who is a woman, never forgets to be exigent. And now there is no reprieve, for I have committed myself, am sentenced, and condemned to be made ridiculous in your eyes. Can there be anything more contemptible, more laughable, more utterly and hopelessly absurd, than an old and ugly man declaring his unrequited passion for a woman who might be his granddaughter? Is he not like a hoary old owl, who leaves his mousing to perch upon one leg and hoot love ditties at the evening star, or screech out amorous sonnets to the maiden moon?"

"Very like," said Unorna with a laugh.

"And yet—my evening star—dear star of my fast-sinking evening—golden Unorna—shall I be cut off from love because my years are many? Or rather, shall I not love you the more, because the years that are left are few and scantily blessed? May not your dawn blend with my sunset and make together one short day?"

"That is very pretty," said Unorna, thoughtfully. He had the power of making his speech sound like a deep, soft music.

"For what is love?" he asked. "Is it a garment, a jewel, a fanciful ornament which only boys and girls may wear upon a summer's holiday? May we take it or leave it, as we please? Wear it, if it shows well upon our beauty, or cast it off for others to put on when we limp aside out of the race of fashion to halt and breathe before we die? Is love beauty? Is love youth? Is love yellow hair or black? Is love the rose upon the lip or the peach blossom in the cheek, that only the young may call it theirs? Is it an outward grace, which can live but so long as the other outward graces are its companions, to perish when the first gray hair streaks the dark locks? Is it a glass, shivered by the first shock of care as a mirror by a sword-stroke? Is it a painted mask, washed colourless by the first rain of autumn tears? Is it a flower, so tender that it must perish miserably in the frosty rime of earliest winter? Is love the accident of youth, the complement of a fresh complexion, the corollary of a light step, the physical concomitant of swelling pulses and unstrained sinews?"

Keyork Arabian laughed softly. Unorna was grave and looked up into his face, resting her chin upon her hand.

"If that is love, if that is the idol of your shrine, the vision of your dreams, the familiar genius of your earthly paradise, why then, indeed, he who worships by your side, and who would share the habitation of your happiness, must wear Absalom's anointed curls and walk with Agag's delicate step. What matter if he be but a half-witted puppet? He is fair. What matter if he be foolish, faithless, forgetful, inconstant, changeable as the tide of the sea? He is young. His youth shall cover all his deficiencies and wipe out all his sins! Imperial love, monarch and despot of the human soul, is become the servant of boys for the wage of a girl's first thoughtless kiss. If that is love let it perish out of the world, with the bloom of the wood violet in spring, with the flutter of the bright moth in June, with the song of the nightingale and the call of the mocking-bird, with all things that are fair and lovely and sweet but for a few short days. If that is love, why then love never made a wound, nor left a scar, nor broke a heart in this easy-going rose-garden of a world. The rose blooms, blows, fades and withers and feels nothing. If that is love, we may yet all develop into passionless promoters of a flat and unprofitable commonwealth; the earth may yet be changed to a sweetmeat for us to feed on, and the sea to sugary lemonade for us to drink, as the mad philosopher foretold, and we may yet all be happy after love has left us."

Unorna smiled, while he laughed again.

"Good," she said. "You tell me what love is not, but you have not told me what it is."

"Love is the immortal essence of mortal passion, together they are as soul and body, one being; separate them, and the body without the soul is a monster, the soul without the body is no longer human, nor earthly, nor real to us at all, though still divine. Love is the world's maker, master and destroyer, the magician whose word can change water to blood, and blood to fire, the dove to a serpent, and the serpent to a dove—ay, and can make of that same dove an eagle, with an eagle's beak, and talons, and air-cleaving wing-stroke. Love is the spirit of life and the angel of death. He speaks, and the thorny wilderness of the lonely heart is become a paradise of flowers. He is silent, and the garden is but a blackened desert over which a destroying flame has passed in the arms of the east wind. Love stands at the gateway of each human soul, holding in his hands a rose and a drawn sword—the sword is for the many, the rose for the one."

He sighed and was silent. Unorna looked at him curiously.

"Have you ever loved, that you should talk like that?" she asked. He turned upon her almost fiercely.

"Loved? Yes, as you can never love; as you, in your woman's heart, can never dream of loving—with every thought, with every fibre, with every pulse, with every breath; with a love that is burning the old oak through and through, root and branch, core and knot, to feathery ashes that you may scatter with a sigh—the only sigh you will ever breathe for me, Unorna. Have I loved? Can I love? Do I love to-day as I loved yesterday and shall love to-morrow? Ah, child! That you should ask that, with your angel's face, when I am in hell for you! When I would give my body to death and my soul to darkness for a touch of your hand, for as much kindness and gentleness in a word from your dear lips as you give the beggars in the street! When I would tear out my heart with my hands to feed the very dog that fawns on you—and who is more to you than I, because he is yours, and all that is yours I love, and worship, and adore!"

Unorna had looked up and smiled at first, believing that it was all but a comedy, as he had told her that it should be. But as he spoke, and the strong words chased each other in the torrent of his passionate speech, she was startled and surprised. There was a force in his language, a fiery energy in his look, a ring of half-desperate hope in his deep voice, which moved her to strange thoughts. His face, too, was changed and ennobled, his gestures larger, even his small stature ceased, for once, to seem dwarfish and gnome-like.

"Keyork Arabian, is it possible that you love me?" she cried, in her wonder.

"Possible? True? There is neither truth nor possibility in anything else for me, in anything, in any one, but you, Unorna. The service of my love fills the days and the nights and the years with you—fills the world with you only; makes heaven to be on earth, since heaven is but the air that is made bright with your breath, as the temple of all temples is but the spot whereon your dear feet stand. The light of life is where you are, the darkness of death is everywhere where you are not. But I am condemned to die, cut off, predestined to be lost—for you have no pity, Unorna, you cannot find it in you to be sorry for the poor old man whose last pulse will beat for you; whose last word will be your name; whose last look upon your beauty will end the dream in which he lived his life. What can it be to you, that I love you so? Why should it be anything to you? When I am gone—with the love of you in my heart, Unorna—when they have buried the ugly old body out of your sight, you will not even remember that I was once your companion, still less that I knelt before you, that I kissed the ground on which you stood; that I loved you as men love whose hearts are breaking, that I touched the hem of your garment and was for one moment young—that I besought you to press my hand but once, with one thought of kindness, with one last and only word of human pity—"

He broke off suddenly, and there was a tremor in his voice which lent intense expression to the words. He was kneeling upon one knee beside Unorna, but between her and the light, so that she saw his face indistinctly. She could not but pity him. She took his outstretched hand in hers.

"Poor Keyork!" she said, very kindly and gently. "How could I have ever guessed all this?"

"It would have been exceedingly strange if you had," answered Keyork, in a tone that made her start.

Then a magnificent peal of bass laughter rolled through the room, as the gnome sprang suddenly to his feet.

"Did I not warn you?" asked Keyork, standing back and contemplating Unorna's surprised face with delight. "Did I not tell you that I was going to make love to you? That I was old and hideous and had everything against me? That it was all a comedy for your amusement? That there was to be nothing but deception from beginning to end? That I was like a decrepit owl screeching at the moon, and many other things to a similar effect?"

Unorna smiled somewhat thoughtfully.

"You are the greatest of great actors, Keyork Arabian. There is something diabolical about you. I sometimes almost think that you are the devil himself!"

"Perhaps I am," suggested the little man cheerfully.

"Do you know that there is a horror about all this?" Unorna rose to her feet. Her smile had vanished and she seemed to feel cold.

As though nothing had happened, Keyork began to make his daily examination of his sleeping patient, applying his thermometer to the body, feeling the pulse, listening to the beatings of the heart with his stethoscope, gently drawing down the lower lid of one of the eyes to observe the colour of the membrane, and, in a word, doing all those things which he was accustomed to do under the circumstances with a promptness and briskness which showed how little he feared that the old man would wake under his touch. He noted some of the results of his observations in a pocket-book. Unorna stood still and watched him.

"Do you remember ever to have been in the least degree like other people?" she asked, speaking after a long silence, as he was returning his notes to his pocket.

"I believe not," he answered. "Nature spared me that indignity—or denied me that happiness—as you may look at it. I am not like other people, as you justly remark. I need not say that it is the other people who are the losers."

"The strange thing is, that you should be able to believe so much of yourself when you find it so hard to believe good of your fellow-men."

"I object to the expression, 'fellow-men,'" returned Keyork promptly. "I dislike phrases, and, generally, maxims as a whole, and all their component parts. A woman must have invented that particular phrase of yours in order to annoy a man she disliked."

"And why, if you please?"

"Because no one ever speaks of 'fellow-women.' The question of woman's duty to man has been amply discussed since the days of Menes the Thinite—but no one ever heard of a woman's duty to her fellow-women; unless, indeed, her duty is to try and outdo them by fair means or foul. Then why talk of man and his fellow-men? I can put the wisest rule of life into two short phrases."

"Give me the advantage of your wisdom."

"The first rule is, Beware of women."

"And the second?"

"Beware of men," laughed the little sage. "Observe the simplicity and symmetry. Each rule has three words, two of which are the same in each, so that you have the result of the whole world's experience at your disposal at the comparatively small expenditure of one verb, one preposition, and two nouns."

"There is little room for love in your system," remarked Unorna, "for such love, for instance, as you described to me a few minutes ago."

"There is too much room for it in yours," retorted Keyork. "Your system is constantly traversed in all directions by bodies, sometimes nebulous and sometimes fiery, which move in unknown orbits at enormous rates of speed. In astronomy they call them comets, and astronomers would be much happier without them."

"I am not an astronomer."

"Fortunately for the peace of the solar system. You have been sending your comets dangerously near to our sick planet," he added, pointing to the sleeper. "If you do it again he will break up into asteroids. To use that particularly disagreeable and suggestive word invented by men, he will die."

"He seems no worse," said Unorna, contemplating the massive, peaceful face.

"I do not like the word 'seems,'" answered Keyork. "It is the refuge of inaccurate persons, unable to distinguish between facts and appearances."

"You object to everything to-day. Are there any words which I may use without offending your sense of fitness in language?"

"None which do not express a willing affirmation of all I say. I will receive any original speech on your part at the point of the sword. You have done enough damage to-day, without being allowed the luxury of dismembering common sense. Seems, you say! By all that is unholy! By Eblis, Ahriman, and the Three Black Angels! He is worse, and there is no seeming. The heat is greater, the pulse is weaker, the heart flutters like a sick bird."

Unorna's face showed her anxiety.

"I am sorry," she said, in a low voice.

"Sorry! No doubt you are. It remains to be seen whether your sorrow can be utilized as a simple, or macerated in tears to make a tonic, or sublimated to produce a corrosive which will destroy the canker, death. But be sorry by all means. It occupies your mind without disturbing me, or injuring the patient. Be sure that if I can find an active application for your sentiment, I will give you the rare satisfaction of being useful."

"You have the art of being the most intolerably disagreeable of living men when it pleases you."

"When you displease me, you should say. I warn you that if he dies—our friend here—I will make further studies in the art of being unbearable to you. You will certainly be surprised by the result."

"Nothing that you could say or do would surprise me."

"Indeed? We shall see."

"I will leave you to your studies, then. I have been here too long as it is."

She moved and arranged the pillow under the head of the sleeping giant and adjusted the folds of his robe. Her touch was tender and skilful in spite of her ill-suppressed anger. Then she turned away and went towards the door. Keyork Arabian watched her until her hand was upon the latch. His sharp eyes twinkled, as though he expected something amusing to occur.

"Unorna!" he said, suddenly, in an altered voice. She stopped and looked back.

"Well?"

"Do not be angry, Unorna. Do not go away like this."

Unorna turned, almost fiercely, and came back a step.

"Keyork Arabian, do you think you can play upon me as on an instrument? Do you suppose that I will come and go at your word like a child—or like a dog? Do you think you can taunt me at one moment, and flatter me the next, and find my humour always at your command?"

The gnome-like little man looked down, made a sort of inclination of his short body, and laid his hand upon his heart.

"I was never presumptuous, my dear lady. I never had the least intention of taunting you, as you express it, and as for your humour—can you suppose that I could expect to command, where it is only mine to obey?"

"It is of no use to talk in that way," said Unorna, haughtily. "I am not prepared to be deceived by your comedy this time."

"Nor I to play one. Since I have offended you, I ask your pardon. Forgive the expression, for the sake of the meaning; the thoughtless word for the sake of the unworded thought."

"How cleverly you turn and twist both thoughts and words!"

"Do not be so unkind, dear friend."

"Unkind to you? I wish I had the secret of some unkindness that you should feel!"

"The knowledge of what I can feel is mine alone," answered Keyork, with a touch of sadness. "I am not a happy man. The world, for me, holds but one interest and one friendship. Destroy the one, or embitter the other, and Keyork's remnant of life becomes but a foretaste of death."

"And that interest—that friendship—where are they?" asked Unorna in a tone still bitter, but less scornful than before.

"Together, in this room, and both in danger, the one through your young haste and impetuosity, the other through my wretched weakness in being made angry; forgive me, Unorna, as I ask forgiveness——"

"Your repentance is too sudden; it savours of the death-bed."

"Small wonder, when my life is in the balance."

"Your life?" She uttered the question incredulously, but not without curiosity.

"My life—and for your word," he answered, earnestly. He spoke so impressively, and in so solemn a tone, that Unorna's face became grave. She advanced another step towards him, and laid her hand upon the back of the chair in which she previously had sat.

"We must understand each other—to-day or never," she said. "Either we must part and abandon the great experiment—for, if we part, it must be abandoned—"

"We cannot part, Unorna."

"Then, if we are to be associates and companions—"

"Friends," said Keyork in a low voice.

"Friends? Have you laid the foundation for a friendship between us? You say that your life is in the balance. That is a figure of speech, I suppose. Or has your comedy another act? I can believe well enough that your greatest interest in life lies there, upon that couch, asleep. I know that you can do nothing without me, as you know it yourself. But in your friendship I can never trust—never!—still less can I believe that any words of mine can affect your happiness, unless they be those you need for the experiment itself. Those, at least, I have not refused to pronounce."

While she was speaking, Keyork began to walk up and down the room, in evident agitation, twisting his fingers and bending down his head.

"My accursed folly!" he exclaimed, as though speaking to himself. "My damnable ingenuity in being odious! It is not to be believed! That a man of my age should think one thing and say another—like a tetchy girl or a spoilt child! The stupidity of the thing! And then, to have the idiotic utterances of the tongue registered and judged as a confession of faith—or rather, of faithlessness! But it is only just—it is only right—Keyork Arabian's self is ruined again by Keyork Arabian's vile speeches, which have no more to do with his self than the clouds on earth have with the sun above them! Ruined, ruined—lost, this time. Cut off from the only living being he respects—the only being whose respect he covets; sent back to die in his loneliness, to perish like a friendless beast, as he is, to the funereal music of his own irrepressible snarling! To growl himself out of the world, like a broken-down old tiger in the jungle, after scaring away all possible peace and happiness and help with his senseless growls! Ugh! It is perfectly just, it is absolutely right and supremely horrible to think of! A fool to the last, Keyork, as you always were—and who would make a friend of such a fool?"

Unorna leaned upon the back of the chair watching him, and wondering whether, after all, he were not in earnest this time. He jerked out his sentences excitedly, striking his hands together and then swinging his arms in strange gestures. His tone, as he gave utterance to his incoherent self-condemnation, was full of sincere conviction and of anger against himself. He seemed not to see Unorna, nor to notice her presence in the room. Suddenly, he stopped, looked at her and came towards her. His manner became very humble.

"You are right, my dear lady," he said. "I have no claim to your forbearance for my outrageous humours. I have offended you, insulted you, spoken to you as no man should speak to any woman. I cannot even ask you to forgive me, and, if I tell you that I am sorry, you will not believe me. Why should you? But you are right. This cannot go on. Rather than run the risk of again showing you my abominable temper, I will go away."

His voice trembled and his bright eyes seemed to grow dull and misty.

"Let this be our parting," he continued, as though mastering his emotion. "I have no right to ask anything, and yet I ask this of you. When I have left you, when you are safe for ever from my humours and my tempers and myself—then, do not think unkindly of Keyork Arabian. He would have seemed the friend he is, but for his unruly tongue."

Unorna hesitated a moment. Then she put out her hand, convinced of his sincerity in spite of herself.

"Let bygones be bygones, Keyork," she said. "You must not go, for I believe you."

At the words, the light returned to his eyes, and a look of ineffable beatitude overspread the face which could be so immovably expressionless.

"You are as kind as you are good, Unorna, and as good as you are beautiful," he said, and with a gesture which would have been courtly in a man of nobler stature, but which was almost grotesque in such a dwarf, he raised her fingers to his lips.

This time, no peal of laugher followed to destroy the impression he had produced upon Unorna. She let her hand rest in his a few seconds, and then gently withdrew it.

"I must be going," she said.

"So soon?" exclaimed Keyork regretfully. "There were many things I had wished to say to you to-day, but if you have no time——"

"I can spare a few minutes," answered Unorna, pausing. "What is it?"

"One thing is this." His face had again become impenetrable as a mask of old ivory, and he spoke in his ordinary way. "This is the question. I was in the Teyn Kirche before I came here."

"In church!" exclaimed Unorna in some surprise, and with a slight smile.

"I frequently go to church," answered Keyork gravely. "While there, I met an old acquaintance of mine, a strange fellow whom I have not seen for years. The world is very small. He is a great traveller—a wanderer through the world."

Unorna looked up quickly, and a very slight colour appeared in her cheeks.

"Who is he?" she asked, trying to seem indifferent. "What is his name?"

"His name? It is strange, but I cannot recall it. He is very tall, wears a dark beard, has a pale, thoughtful face. But I need not describe him, for he told me that he had been with you this morning. That is not the point."

He spoke carelessly and scarcely glanced at Unorna while speaking.

"What of him?" she inquired, trying to seem as indifferent as her companion.

"He is a little mad, poor man, that is all. It struck me that, if you would, you might save him. I know something of his story, though not much. He once loved a young girl, now doubtless dead, but whom he still believes to be alive, and he spends—or wastes—his life in a useless search for her. You might cure him of the delusion."

"How do you know that the girl is dead?"

"She died in Egypt, four years ago," answered Keyork. "They had taken her there in the hope of saving her, for she was at death's door already, poor child."

"But if you convince him of that."

"There is no convincing him, and if he were really convinced he would die himself. I used to take an interest in the man, and I know that you could cure him in a simpler and safer way. But of course it lies with you."

"If you wish it, I will try," Unorna answered, turning her face from the light. "But he will probably not come back to me."

"He will. I advised him very strongly to come back, very strongly indeed. I hope I did right. Are you displeased?"

"Not at all!" Unorna laughed a little. "And if he comes, how am I to convince him that he is mistaken, and that the girl is dead?"

"That is very simple. You will hypnotise him, he will yield very easily, and you will suggest to him very forcibly to forget the girl's existence. You can suggest to him to come back to-morrow and the next day, or as often as you please, and you can renew the suggestion each time. In a week he will have forgotten—as you know people can forget—entirely, totally, without hope of recalling what is lost."

"That is true," said Unorna, in a low voice. "Are you sure that the effect will be permanent?" she asked with sudden anxiety.

"A case of the kind occurred in Hungary last year. The cure was effected in Pesth. I was reading it only a few months ago. The oblivion was still complete, as long as six months after the treatment, and there seems no reason to suppose that the patient's condition will change. I thought it might interest you to try it."

"It will interest me extremely. I am very grateful to you for telling me about him."

Unorna had watched her companion narrowly during the conversation, expecting him to betray his knowledge of a connection between the Wanderer's visit and the strange question she had been asking of the sleeper when Keyork had surprised her. She was agreeably disappointed in this however. He spoke with a calmness and ease of manner which disarmed suspicion.

"I am glad I did right," said he.

He stood at the foot of the couch upon which the sleeper was lying, and looked thoughtfully and intently at the calm features.

"We shall never succeed in this way," he said at last. "This condition may continue indefinitely, till you are old, and I—until I am older than I am by many years. He may not grow weaker, but he cannot grow stronger. Theories will not renew tissues."

Unorna looked up.

"That has always been the question," she answered. "At least, you have told me so. Will lengthened rest and perfect nourishment alone give a new impulse to growth or will they not?"

"They will not. I am sure of it now. We have arrested decay, or made it so slow as to be imperceptible. But we have made many attempts to renew the old frame, and we are no farther advanced than we were nearly four years ago. Theories will not make tissues."

"What will?"

"Blood," answered Keyork Arabian very softly.

"I have heard of that being done for young people in illness," said Unorna.

"It has never been done as I would do it," replied the gnome, shaking his head and gathering his great beard in his hand, as he gazed at the sleeper.

"What would you do?"

"I would make it constant for a day, or for a week if I could—a constant circulation; the young heart and the old should beat together; it could be done in the lethargic sleep—an artery and a vein—a vein and an artery—I have often thought of it; it could not fail. The new young blood would create new tissue, because it would itself constantly be renewed in the young body which is able to renew it, only expending itself in the old. The old blood would itself become young again as it passed to the younger man."

"A man!" exclaimed Unorna.

"Of course. An animal would not do, because you could not produce the lethargy nor make use of suggestion for healing purposes—"

"But it would kill him!"

"Not at all, as I would do it, especially if the young man were very strong and full of life. When the result is obtained, an antiseptic ligature, suggestion of complete healing during sleep, proper nourishment, such as we are giving at present, by recalling the patient to the hypnotic state, sleep again, and so on; in eight and forty hours your young man would be waked and would never know what had happened to him—unless he felt a little older, by nervous sympathy," added the sage with a low laugh.

"Are you perfectly sure of what you say?" asked Unorna eagerly.

"Absolutely. I have examined the question for years. There can be no doubt of it. Food can maintain life, blood alone can renew it."

"Have you everything you need here?" inquired Unorna.

"Everything. There is no hospital in Europe that has the appliances we have prepared for every emergency."

He looked at her face curiously. It was ghastly pale with excitement. The pupil of her brown eye was so widely expanded that the iris looked black, while the aperture of the gray one was contracted to the size of a pin's head, so that the effect was almost that of a white and sightless ball.

"You seem interested," said the gnome.

"Would such a man—such a man as Israel Kafka answer the purpose?" she asked.

"Admirably," replied the other, beginning to understand.

"Keyork Arabian," whispered Unorna, coming close to him and bending down to his ear, "Israel Kafka is alone under the palm tree where I always sit. He is asleep, and he will not wake."

The gnome looked up and nodded gravely. But she was gone almost before she had finished speaking the words.

"As upon an instrument," said the little man, quoting Unorna's angry speech. "Truly I can play upon you, but it is a strange music."

Half an hour later Unorna returned to her place among the flowers, but Israel Kafka was gone.



CHAPTER VII

The Wanderer, when Keyork Arabian had left him, had intended to revisit Unorna without delay, but he had not proceeded far in the direction of her house when he turned out of his way and entered a deserted street which led towards the river. He walked slowly, drawing his furs closely about him, for it was very cold.

He found himself in one of those moments of life in which the presentiment of evil almost paralyses the mind's power of making any decision. In general, a presentiment is but the result upon the consciousness of conscious or unconscious fear. This fear is very often the natural consequence of the reaction which, in melancholy natures, comes almost inevitably after a sudden and unexpected satisfaction or after a period in which the hopes of the individual have been momentarily raised by some unforeseen circumstance. It is by no means certain that hope is of itself a good thing. The wise and mournful soul prefers the blessedness of that non-expectancy which shall not be disappointed, to the exhilarating pleasures of an anticipation which may prove empty. In this matter lies one of the great differences between the normal moral state of the heathen and that of the Christian. The Greek hoped for all things in this world and for nothing in the next; the Christian, on the contrary, looks for a happiness to come hereafter, while fundamentally denying the reality of any earthly joy whatsoever in the present. Man, however, is so constituted as to find it almost impossible to put faith in either bliss alone, without helping his belief by borrowing some little refreshment from the hope of the other. The wisest of the Greeks believed the soul to be immortal; the sternest of Christians cannot forget that once or twice in his life he had been contemptibly happy, and condemns himself for secretly wishing that he might be as happy again before all is over. Faith is the evidence of things unseen, but hope is the unreasoning belief that unseen things may soon become evident. The definition of faith puts earthly disappointment out of the question; that of hope introduces it into human affairs as a constant and imminent probability.

The development of psychologic research in our day has proved beyond a doubt that individuals of a certain disposition may be conscious of events actually occurring, or which have recently occurred, at a great distance; but it has not shown satisfactorily that things yet to happen are foreshadowed by that restless condition of the sensibilities which we call presentiment. We may, and perhaps must, admit that all that is or has been produces a real and perceptible impression upon all else that is. But there is as yet no good reason for believing that an impression of what shall be can be conveyed by anticipation—without reasoning—to the mind of man.

But though the realisation of a presentiment may be as doubtful as any event depending upon chance alone, yet the immense influence which a mere presentiment may exercise is too well known to be denied. The human intelligence has a strong tendency to believe in its own reasonings, of which, indeed, the results are often more accurate and reliable than those reached by the physical perceptions alone. The problems which can be correctly solved by inspection are few indeed compared with those which fall within the province of logic. Man trusts to his reason, and then often confounds the impressions produced by his passions with the results gained by semi-conscious deduction. His love, his hate, his anger create fears, and these supply him with presentiments which he is inclined to accept as so many well-reasoned grounds of action. If he is often deceived, he becomes aware of his mistake, and, going to the other extreme, considers a presentiment as a sort of warning that the contrary of what he expects will take place; if he chances to be often right he grows superstitious.

The lonely man who was pacing the icy pavement of the deserted street on that bitter winter's day felt the difficulty very keenly. He would not yield and he could not advance. His heart was filled with forebodings which his wisdom bade him treat with indifference, while his passion gave them new weight and new horror with every minute that passed.

He had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears. Beatrice had been before him, and her voice had reached him among the voices of thousands, but now, since the hours has passed and he had not found her, it was as though he had been near her in a dream, and the strong certainty took hold of him that she was dead and that he had looked upon her wraith in the shadowy church.

He was a strong man, not accustomed to distrust his senses, and his reason opposed itself instantly to the suggestion of the supernatural. He had many times, on entering a new city, felt himself suddenly elated by the irresistible belief that his search was at an end, and that within a few hours he must inevitably find her whom he had sought so long. Often as he passed through the gates of some vast burying-place, he had almost hesitated to walk through the silent ways, feeling all at once convinced that upon the very first headstone he was about to see the name that was ever in his heart. But the expectation of final defeat, like the anticipation of final success, had been always deceived. Neither living nor dead had he found her.

Two common, reasonable possibilities lay before him, and two only. He had either seen Beatrice, or he had not. If she had really been in the Teyn Kirche, she was in the city and not far from him. If she had not been there, he had been deceived by an accidental but extraordinary likeness. Within the logical concatenation of cause and effect there was no room for any other supposition, and it followed that his course was perfectly clear. He must continue his search until he should find the person he had seen, and the result would be conclusive, for he would again see the same face and hear the same voice. Reason told him that he had in all likelihood been mistaken after all. Reason reminded him that the church had been dark, the multitude of worshippers closely crowded together, the voices that sang almost innumerable and wholly undistinguishable from each other. Reason showed him a throng of possibilities, all pointing to an error of his perceptions and all in direct contradiction with the one fact which his loving instinct held for true.

The fear of evil, the presentiment of death, defied logic and put its own construction and interpretation upon the strange event. He neither believed, nor desired to believe, in a supernatural visitation, yet the inexplicable certainty of having seen a ghostly vision overwhelmed reason and all her arguments. Beatrice was dead. Her spirit had passed in that solemn hour when the Wanderer had stood in the dusky church; he had looked upon her shadowy wraith, and had heard the echo of a voice from beyond the stars, whose crystal tones already swelled the diviner harmony of an angelic strain.

The impression was so strong at first as to be but one step removed from conviction. The shadow of a great mourning fell upon him, of a grief too terrible for words, too solemn for tears, too strong to find any expression save in death itself. He walked heavily, bending his head, his eyes half closed as though in bodily pain, the icy pavement rang like iron under his tread, the frozen air pierced through him, as his sorrow pierced his heart, the gloom of the fast-sinking winter's day deepened as the darkness in his own soul. He, who was always alone, knew at last what loneliness could mean. While she had lived she had been with him always, a living, breathing woman, visible to his inner eyes, speaking to his inward hearing, waking in his sleepless love. He had sought her with restless haste and untiring strength through the length and breadth of the whole world, but yet she had never left him, he had never been separated from her for one moment, never, in the years of his wandering, had he entered the temple of his heart without finding her in its most holy place. Men had told him that she was dead, but he had looked within himself and had seen that she was still alive; the dread of reading her sacred name carved upon the stone that covered her resting-place, had chilled him and made his sight tremble, but he had entered the shrine of his soul and had found her again, untouched by death, unchanged by years, living, loved, and loving. But now, when he shut out the dismal street from view, and went to the sanctuary and kneeled upon the threshold, he saw but a dim vision, as of something lying upon an altar in the dark, something shrouded in white, something shapely and yet shapeless, something that had been and was not any more.

He reached the end of the street, but he felt a reluctance to leave it, and turned back again, walking still more slowly and heavily than before. So far as any outward object or circumstance could be said to be in harmony with his mood, the dismal lane, the failing light, the bitter air, were at that moment sympathetic to him. The tomb itself is not more sepulchral than certain streets and places in Prague on a dark winter's afternoon. In the certainty that the last and the greatest of misfortunes had befallen him, the Wanderer turned back into the gloomy by-way as the pale, wreathing ghosts, fearful of the sharp daylight and the distant voices of men, sink back at dawn into the graves out of which they have slowly risen to the outer air in the silence of the night.

Death, the arch-steward of eternity, walks the bounds of man's entailed estate, and the headstones of men's graves are landmarks in the great possession committed to his stewardship, enclosing within their narrow ring the wretched plot of land which makes up all of life's inheritance. From ever to always the generations of men do bondsmen's service in that single field, to plough it and sow it, and harrow it and water it, to lay the sickle to the ripe corn if so be that their serfdom falls in the years of plenty and the ear is full, to eat the bread of tears, if their season of servitude be required of them in a time of scarcity and famine. Bondsmen of death, from birth, they are sent forth out of the sublime silence of the pathless forest which hems in the open glebe land of the present and which is eternity, past and to come; bondsmen of death, from youth to age, they join in the labour of the field, they plough, they sow, they reap, perhaps, tears they shed many, and of laughter there is also a little amongst them; bondsmen of death, to the last, they are taken in the end, when they have served their tale of years, many or few, and they are led from furrow and grass land, willing or unwilling, mercifully or cruelly, to the uttermost boundary, and they are thrust out quickly into the darkness whence they came. For their place is already filled, and the new husbandmen, their children, have in their turn come into the field, to eat of the fruit they sowed, to sow in turn a seed of which they themselves shall not see the harvest, whose sheaves others shall bind, whose ears others shall thresh, and of whose corn others shall make bread after them. With our eyes we may yet see the graves of two hundred generations of men, whose tombs serve but to mark that boundary more clearly, whose fierce warfare, when they fought against the master, could not drive back that limit by a handbreadth, whose uncomplaining labour, when they accepted their lot patiently, earned them not one scant foot of soil wherewith to broaden their inheritance as reward for their submission; and of them all, neither man nor woman was ever forgotten in the day of reckoning, nor was one suffered to linger in the light. Death will bury a thousand generations more, in graves as deep, strengthening year by year the strong chain of his grim landmarks. He will remember us every one when the time comes; to some of us he will vouchsafe a peaceful end, but some shall pass away in mortal agony, and some shall be dragged unconscious to the other side; but all must go. Some shall not see him till he is at hand, and some shall dream of him in year-long dreams of horror, to be taken unawares at the last. He will remember us every one and will come to us, and the place of our rest shall be marked for centuries, for years, or for seconds, for each a stone, or a few green sods laid upon a mound beneath the sky, or the ripple on a changing wave when the loaded sack has slipped from the smooth plank, and the sound of a dull splash has died away in the wind. There be strong men, as well as weak, who shudder and grow cold when they think of that yet undated day which must close with its black letter their calendar of joy and sorrow; there are weaklings, as well as giants, who fear death for those they love, but who fear not anything else at all. The master treats courage and cowardice alike; Achilles and Thersites must alike perish, and none will be so bold as to say that he can tell the dust of the misshapen varlet from the ashes of the swift-footed destroyer, whose hair was once so bright, whose eyes were so fierce, whose mighty heart was so slothless, so wrathful, so inexorable and so brave.

The Wanderer was of those who dread nothing save for the one dearly-beloved object, but who, when that fear is once roused by a real or an imaginary danger, can suffer in one short moment the agony which should be distributed through a whole lifetime. The magnitude of his passion could lend to the least thought or presentiment connected with it the force of a fact and the overwhelming weight of a real calamity.

In order to feel any great or noble passion a man must have an imagination both great and sensitive in at least one direction. The execution of a rare melody demands as a prime condition an instrument of wide compass and delicate construction, and one of even more rich and varied capabilities is needed to render those grand harmonies which are woven in the modulation of sonorous chords. A skilful hand may draw a scale from wooden blocks set upon ropes of straw, but the great musician must hold the violin, or must feel the keys of the organ under his fingers and the responsive pedals at his feet, before he can expect to interpret fittingly the immortal thought of the composer. The strings must vibrate in perfect tune, the priceless wood must be seasoned and penetrated with the melodies of years, and scores of years, the latent music must be already trembling to be free, before the hand that draws the bow can command the ears and hearts of those who hear. So, too, love, the chief musician of this world, must find an instrument worthy of his touch before he can show all his power, and make heart and soul ring with the lofty strains of a sublime passion. Not every one knows what love means; few indeed know all that love can mean. There is no more equality among men than there is likeness between them, and no two are alike. The many have little, the few have much. To the many is given the faint perception of higher things, which is either the vestige, or the promise, of a nobler development, past or yet to come. As through a veil they see the line of beauty which it is not theirs to trace; as in a dream they hear the succession of sweet tones which they can themselves never bring together, though their half-grown instinct feels a vague satisfaction in the sequence; as from another world, they listen to the poet's song, wondering, admiring, but powerless over the great instrument of human speech, from whose 15,000 keys their touch can draw but the dull, tuneless prose of daily question and answer; as in a mirage of things unreal, they see the great deeds that are done in their time for love or hate, for race or country, for ambition and for vengeance, but though they see the result, and know the motive, the inward meaning and spirit of it all escapes them. It is theirs to be, and existence is in itself their all. To think, to create, to act, to feel can be only for the few. To one is given the transcendent genius that turns the very stones along life's road to precious gems of thought; whose gift it is to find speech in dumb things and eloquence in the ideal half of the living world; to whom sorrow is a melody and joy sweet music; to whom the humblest effort of a humble life can furnish an immortal lyric, and in whom one thought of the Divine can inspire a sublime hymn. Another stoops and takes a handful of clay from the earth, and with the pressure of his fingers moulds it to the reality of an unreal image seen in dreams; or, standing before the vast, rough block of marble, he sees within the mass the perfection of a faultless form—he lays the chisel to the stone, the mallet strikes the steel, one by one the shapeless fragments fly from the shapely limbs, the matchless curves are uncovered, the breathing mouth smiles through the petrifaction of a thousand ages, the shroud of stone falls from the godlike brow, and the Hermes of Olympia stands forth in all his deathless beauty. Another is born to the heritage of this world's power, fore-destined to rule and fated to destroy; the naked sword of destiny lies in his cradle; the axe of a king-maker awaits the awakening of his strength; the sceptre of supreme empire hangs within his reach. Unknown, he dreams and broods over the future; unheeded, he begins to move among his fellows; a smile, half of encouragement, half of indifference, greets his first effort; he advances a little farther, and thoughtful men look grave, another step, and suddenly all mankind cries out and faces him and would beat him back; but it is too late; one struggle more, and the hush of a great and unknown fear falls on the wrangling nations; they are silent, and the world is his. He is the man who is already thinking when others have scarcely begun to feel; who is creating before the thoughts of his rivals have reached any conclusion; who acts suddenly, terribly and irresistibly, before their creations have received life. And yet, the greatest and the richest inheritance of all is not his, for it has fallen to another, to the man of heart, and it is the inheritance of the kingdom of love.

In all ages the reason of the world has been at the mercy of brute force. The reign of law has never had more than a passing reality, and never can have more than that so long as man is human. The individual intellect and the aggregate intelligence of nations and races have alike perished in the struggles of mankind, to revive again, indeed, but as surely to be again put to the edge of the sword. Here and there great thoughts and great masterpieces have survived the martyrdom of a thinker, the extinction of a school, the death of a poet, the wreck of a high civilisation. Socrates is murdered with the creed of immortality on his very lips; hardly had he spoken the wonderful words recorded in the Phaedo when the fatal poison sent its deathly chill through his limbs; the Greeks are gone, yet the Hermes of Olympia remains, mutilated and maimed, indeed, but faultless still, and still supreme. The very name of Homer is grown wellnigh as mythic as his blindness. There are those to-day who, standing by the grave of William Shakespeare, say boldly that he was not the creator of the works that bear his name. And still, through the centuries, Achilles wanders lonely by the shore of the sounding sea; Paris loves, and Helen is false; Ajax raves, and Odysseus steers his sinking ship through the raging storm. Still, Hamlet the Avenger swears, hesitates, kills at last, and then himself is slain; Romeo sighs in the ivory moonlight, and love-bound Juliet hears the triumphant lark carolling his ringing hymn high in the cool morning air, and says it is the nightingale—Immortals all, the marble god, the Greek, the Dane, the love-sick boy, the maiden foredoomed to death. But how short is the roll-call of these deathless ones! Through what raging floods of destruction have they lived, through what tempests have they been tossed, upon what inhospitable shores have they been cast up by the changing tides of time! Since they were called to life by the great, half-nameless departed, how often has their very existence been forgotten by all but a score in tens of millions? Has it been given to those embodied thoughts of transcendent genius to ride in the whirlwind of men's passions or to direct the stormy warfare of half frantic nations? Since they were born in all their bright perfection, to live on in unchanging beauty, violence has ruled the world; many a time since then the sword has mown down its harvest of thinkers, many a time has the iron harrow of war torn up and scarred the face of the earth. Athens still stands in broken loveliness, and the Tiber still rolls its tawny waters heavily through Rome; but Rome and Athens are to-day but places of departed spirits; they are no longer the seats of life, their broken hearts are petrified. All men may see the ports through which the blood flowed to the throbbing centre, the traces of the mighty arteries through which it was driven to the ends of the earth. But the blood is dried up, the hearts are broken, and though in their stony ruins those dead world-hearts be grander and more enduring than any which in our time are whole and beating, yet neither their endurance nor their grandeur have saved them from man, the destroyer, nor was the beauty of their thoughts or the thoughtfully-devised machinery of their civilisation a shield against a few score thousand rough-hammered blades, wielded by rough-hewn mortals who recked neither of intellect nor of civilisation, nor yet of beauty, being but very human men, full of terribly strong and human passions. Look where you will, throughout the length and breadth of all that was the world five thousand, or five hundred years ago; everywhere passion has swept thought before it, and belief, reason. And we, too, with our reason and our thoughts, shall be swept from existence and the memory of it. Is this the age of reason, and is this the reign of law? In the midst of this civilisation of ours three millions of men lie down nightly by their arms, men trained to handle rifle and sword, taught to destroy and to do nothing else; and nearly as many more wait but a summons to leave their homes and join the ranks. And often it is said that we are on the eve of a universal war. At the command of a few individuals, at the touch of a few wires, more than five millions of men in the very prime and glory of strength, armed as men never were armed since time began, will arise and will kill civilisation and thought, as both the one and the other have been slain before by fewer hands and less deadly weapons. Is this reason, or is this law? Passion rules the world, and rules alone. And passion is neither of the head, nor of the hand, but of the heart. Passion cares nothing for the mind. Love, hate, ambition, anger, avarice, either make a slave of intelligence to serve their impulses, or break down its impotent opposition with the unanswerable argument of brute force, and tear it to pieces with iron hands.

Love is the first, the greatest, the gentlest, the most cruel, the most irresistible of passions. In his least form he is mighty. A little love has destroyed many a great friendship. The merest outward semblance of love has made such havoc as no intellect could repair. The reality has made heroes and martyrs, traitors and murderers, whose names will not be forgotten, for glory or for shame. Helen is not the only woman whose smile has kindled the beacon of a ten years' war, nor Antony the only man who has lost the world for a caress. It may be that the Helen who shall work our destruction is even now twisting and braiding her golden hair; it may be that the new Antony, who is to lose this same old world again, already stands upon the steps of Cleopatra's throne. Love's day is not over yet, nor has man outgrown the love of woman.

But the power to love greatly is a gift, differing much in kind, though little in degree, from the inspiration of the poet, the genius of the artist, or the unerring instinct and eagle's glance of the conqueror; for conqueror, artist and poet are moved by passion and not by reason, which is but their servant in so far as it can be commanded to move others, and their deadliest enemy when it would move themselves. Let the passion and the instrument but meet, being suited to each other, and all else must go down before them. Few, indeed, are they to whom is given that rich inheritance, and they themselves alone know all their wealth, and all their misery, all the boundless possibilities of happiness that are theirs, and all the dangers and the terrors that beset their path. He who has won woman in the face of daring rivals, of enormous odds, of gigantic obstacles, knows what love means; he who has lost her, having loved her, alone has measured with his own soul the bitterness of earthly sorrow, the depth of total loneliness, the breadth of the wilderness of despair. And he who has sorrowed long, who has long been alone, but who has watched the small, twinkling ray still burning upon the distant border of his desert—the faint glimmer of a single star that was still above the horizon of despair—he only can tell what utter darkness can be upon the face of the earth when that last star has set for ever. With it are gone suddenly the very quarters and cardinal points of life's chart, there is no longer any right hand or any left, any north or south, any rising of the sun or any going down, any forward or backward direction in his path, any heaven above, or any hell below. The world has stood still and there is no life in the thick, black stillness. Death himself is dead, and one living man is forgotten behind, to mourn him as a lost friend, to pray that some new destroyer, more sure of hand than death himself, may come striding through the awful silence to make an end at last of the tormented spirit, to bear it swiftly to the place where that last star ceased to shine, and to let it down into the restful depths of an unremembering eternity. But into that place, which is the soul of man, no destroyer can penetrate; that solitary life neither the sword, nor pestilence, nor age, nor eternity can extinguish; that immortal memory no night can obscure. There was a beginning indeed, but end there can be none.

Such a man was the Wanderer, as he paced the deserted street in the cruel, gloomy cold of the late day. Between his sight and the star of his own hope an impenetrable shadow had arisen, so that he saw it no more. The memory of Beatrice was more than ever distinct to his inner sense, but the sudden presentiment of her death, real in its working as any certainty, had taken the reality of her from the ground on which he stood. For that one link had still been between them. Somewhere, near or far, during all these years, she, too, had trodden the earth with her light footsteps, the same universal mother earth on which they both moved and lived. The very world was hers, since she was touching it, and to touch it in his turn was to feel her presence. For who could tell what hidden currents ran in the secret depths, or what mysterious interchange of sympathy might not be maintained through them? The air itself was hers, since she was somewhere breathing it; the stars, for she looked on them; the sun, for it warmed her; the cold of winter, for it chilled her too; the breezes of spring, for they fanned her pale cheek and cooled her dark brow. All had been hers, and at the thought that she had passed away, a cry of universal mourning broke from the world she had left behind, and darkness descended upon all things, as a funeral pall.