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+Project Gutenberg's The Mystery of a Turkish Bath, by E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Mystery of a Turkish Bath
+
+Author: E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
+
+Release Date: May 31, 2008 [EBook #25656]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERY OF A TURKISH BATH ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Nick Hodson of London, England
+
+
+
+
+The Mystery of a Turkish Bath, by Rita.
+
+________________________________________________________________________
+Under the pseudonym "Rita" E M Gollan wrote some seventy novels of
+which this is one.  It is a rather penetrating book about the
+supernatural.  It starts off with a somewhat unusual situation, at least
+in literature, with a group of ladies in the turkish bath of a large and
+luxurious hotel by the sea, in England, the sort of hotel to which
+people go to be cured of illnesses, on the recommendation of their
+doctors.  It is some time in the late nineteenth century.
+
+An extraordinarily beautiful woman appears one day in the turkish bath,
+and the women already in there are quite fascinated by her.  But there
+is another guest in the hotel, a Colonel Estcourt, who, it turns out had
+known this woman since childhood.  Indeed it had been expected that they
+would one day wed, but instead she had gone off and married an elderly,
+but fabulously wealthy, Russian prince.
+
+Various demonstrations of her occult powers make the guests, both men
+and women, realise that the beautiful Princess is someone with very
+special gifts, which one or two of them would like to learn more about.
+But in the very process of the ensuing teach-in, more things happen
+than had been bargained for, and both the Colonel and the Princess end
+up lifeless.  The Mystery deepens.
+
+If you like this sort of thing it is a very good novel, but if you are
+not happy to read about the occult, you should leave it severely alone.
+
+________________________________________________________________________
+THE MYSTERY OF A TURKISH BATH, BY RITA.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE.
+
+THE FIRST ROOM.
+
+"I take them for rheumatic gout," said a slight, dark-haired woman to
+her neighbour, as she leant back in a low lounging-chair, and sipped
+some water an attendant had just brought her.  "You would not suppose I
+suffered from such a complaint, would you?"--and she held up a small
+arched foot, with a scarcely perceptible swelling in the larger joint.
+She laughed somewhat affectedly, and the neighbour, who was fat and
+coarse, and had decided gouty symptoms herself, looked at her with
+something of the contempt an invalid elephant might be supposed to
+bestow on a buzzing fly.
+
+"You made that remark the last time you were here," she said; "and I
+told you, if you suffered from a suppressed form of the disease, it
+would be all the worse for you.  Much better for it to come out--my
+doctor says."
+
+There was no doubt about the disease having "come out" in the person of
+the speaker.  It had "come out" in her face, which was brilliantly
+rubicund; in her hands, and ankles and feet, which were a distressful
+spectacle of "knobs" and "bumps" of an exaggerated phrenological type--
+perhaps also in her temper, which was fierce and fiery as her
+complexion, as most of the frequenters of the Baths knew, and the
+attendants also, to their cost.
+
+The small, dark lady, with the arched feet, lapsed into sulky silence,
+and let her eyes wander over the room to see if anyone she knew was
+there.
+
+The Baths were of an extensive and sumptuous description--fitted up with
+almost oriental luxury and comfort, and attached to a monster hotel,
+built by an enterprising Company of speculators, at an English winter
+resort, in Hampshire.
+
+The Company had proudly hoped that lavish expenditure, a beautiful
+situation, and the disinterested recommendation of fashionable
+physicians, would induce English people to discover that there were
+spots and places in their own land as healthy and convenient as
+Auvergne, or Wiesbaden, or the Riviera.  But though the coast views were
+fine, and the scenery picturesque, and the monster hotel itself stood on
+a commanding eminence, surrounded by darkly-beautiful pine woods, and
+was fitted up with every luxury of modern civilisation, including every
+specimen of Bath that human ingenuity had devised, the Company looked
+blankly at the returns on their balance-sheet, and one or two Directors
+murmured audible complaints at special Board meetings, against the
+fashionable physicians who had not acted up to their promises, or proved
+deserving of the substantial bonus which had been more than hinted at,
+as a reward for recommended patients.
+
+On this December morning, some half-dozen ladies, of various ages and
+stability of person, and all suffering, in a greater or less degree,
+from various fashionable complaints--such as neuralgia, indigestion,
+rheumatism, or its aristocratic cousin, rheumatic-gout--were in Room
+Number One of the Turkish Bath.
+
+The female form is generally supposed to be "divine," and poets and
+painters have, from time immemorial, rhapsodised over "beauty
+unadorned."  It is probable that such poets and painters have never been
+gratified by such a vision of feminine charms as Room Number One
+presented.
+
+Light and airy garments were, certainly, to be seen, but not--forms.  It
+was, of course, a question of taste, as to whether the fat women, or the
+thin women, looked the worst--probably the former, if one might judge by
+the two samples of the lady who had arched feet, and the lady who had
+_not_.
+
+Both were staying at the hotel, and were respectively named--Mrs
+Masterman, and Mrs Ray Jefferson.  Mrs Masterman was a widow.  Mrs
+Ray Jefferson had a husband.  He was an American, blessed with many
+dollars, amassed on the strength of an "Invention."  When Mr Jefferson
+spoke of the Invention, people usually supposed it to be of a mechanical
+nature.  As they became more familiar with him, they learnt that it was
+something "Chemical."  No one quite knew what, but it became associated
+in their minds with "vats" and "boilers," and large works somewhere
+"down Boston way."  There could be no doubt of the excellence of the
+Invention, because Mr Ray Jefferson said it was known, and used all
+over Europe, and its success was backed by dollars to an apparently
+unlimited extent.  The Inventor and his wife had sumptuous rooms, but
+they were not averse to mixing with their "fellow-man," or rather
+"woman,"--for Mrs Jefferson rejoiced in the possession of certain
+Parisian _toilettes_, and was not selfish enough to keep them only for
+the eyes of her lord and master.
+
+She was grudgingly but universally acknowledged to be the best-dressed
+woman in the hotel--except, of course, when she was in the Turkish
+Baths, which unfortunately reduced its frequenters to one level of
+apparelling, a garment which made up in simplicity for any lack of
+elegance.
+
+The shape was always the same--viz., short in the skirt, low in the
+neck, and bare as to sleeves.  The material was generally pink cotton,
+or white with a red border.
+
+Mrs Jefferson was quite American enough to have "notions" on dress,
+more or less original and extravagant.  Finding her companion was
+unusually silent this morning, she gave up her thoughts to the devising
+of a special toilet for the Bath.
+
+These garments were so hideous, she told herself, that it was no wonder
+people looked such guys in them.  Still there was no reason why she
+should not have something _chic_ and novel for herself--something which
+should arouse the envy of, and make the wearer appear quite different
+to, the other women.
+
+The choice of style was easy enough--something Grecian and artistic--but
+the material discomposed her.  It was hardly possible to have a bath of
+this description without one's garment getting into a moist and clinging
+condition--leaving alone the after processes of shampooing, _douche_,
+and plunge.  So silk, or satin, or woollen material was out of the
+question, and cotton was common, not to say vulgar.
+
+She knitted her brows with a vigour demanded by so absorbing a subject:
+the white head-cloth fell off, and she felt that her fringe was all out
+of curl and lay straight on her forehead in most unbecoming fashion.
+That also would have to be considered in the question of costume--a
+head-dress which should combine use and ornament.  The idea of having
+only a wet, white rag on one's head!  No wonder people looked "objects!"
+Perhaps it would be better to coil the hair about the brow and have no
+fringe, or at least only a few loose locks that would look equally well,
+straight or curled.
+
+As Mrs Ray Jefferson was taking all this trouble about her personal
+appearance, when that appearance would only gratify the sight of a few
+members of her own sex who were generally too much taken up with their
+own ailments or complaints to care what their fellow-sufferers looked
+like, it shows the fallacy of a popular superstition that women only
+care to dress for men.  Believe me, no--they dress for critics, the
+critics of their own sex, who with one contemptuous glance can sweep a
+_toilette_ into insignificance, and make its wearer miserable, or, by
+some envious approbation, are reluctantly compelled to bestow on it the
+seal of success.
+
+Is it for men, think you, that those delicate _nuances_ and tints and
+shades are harmonised and put together?  Such a conceit is only
+pardonable in a set of beings who possess not the delicate faculty of
+"detail," and who, with a limited knowledge of even cardinal colours,
+describe the graces and beauties of a _toilette_ by saying the wearer
+had on something white, or something black, or something red, but "it
+suited her down to the ground."  A few misguided individuals have even
+been known to take refuge in the remark (made historic now by comic
+papers) that "they never look _under_ the table," when asked what
+certain ladies had on.  But this is trifling, and only applicable to
+dinner parties.
+
+Mrs Ray Jefferson's thoughts had not prevented her from taking stock of
+the other inmates of the room.  One or two were lying on couches, but
+most of them seemed to prefer the low comfortable chairs, that were like
+rocking-chairs without the rockers.
+
+No one spoke.  They looked solemn and suffering, and appeared intent
+merely on the symptoms of distilled moisture on the visible portion of
+their persons.
+
+"I think," said Mrs Jefferson, "I shall go into the second room.  I can
+stand some more heat."
+
+She made the remark, abstractedly, in the direction of her neighbour,
+who only looked at her in a bored and ill-tempered fashion, as befitted
+one who had gout without arched feet to display as compensation.
+
+"You and I are the only hotel people here," went on Mrs Jefferson, as
+she took up the glass of water and the head-cloth preparatory to moving
+away.  Then she laughed again as she looked at her companion's flushed
+countenance and generally distressed appearance.  "What a comfort," she
+said, "that we won't look quite such objects at dinner-time!  I always
+find a bath improves my complexion, don't you?"
+
+Mrs Markham gave an impatient grunt.  "As if it mattered what one looks
+like in a bath!" she said.  "Do you Americans live in public all your
+lives?  You seem to be always thinking of your clothes, or your looks!"
+
+Mrs Jefferson opened her lips to reply with suitable indignation, but
+the words were cut short by a gasp of astonishment, and lost themselves
+in one wondering, long-drawn monosyllable--"My--!"
+
+The gouty sufferer also looked up, and in the direction of the doorway,
+and though she said nothing, her eyes expressed as much surprise as was
+compatible with a sluggish temperament, and a disposition to cavil at
+most things and persons that were presented to her notice.
+
+The object on which the two pairs of feminine eyes rested was only the
+figure of a woman standing between the thick oriental curtains that
+partitioned off the dressing from the shampooing and douche rooms.
+
+A woman--but a woman so beautiful that she held even her own sex dumb
+with admiration.  She was tall, but not too tall for perfect grace; and
+slender, but with the slenderness of some young pictured goddess.  She
+was dark, too, but with a pale clear skin that was more lovely than any
+dead blonde whiteness; and to crown her charms, she had long rippling
+hair of jet black hue that was parted from her brow and fell like a veil
+to her delicate arched feet, and through which the serious, darkly--
+glowing eyes looked straight at the wondering faces before her.
+
+The pause she made before entering was brief, but not so brief that
+every eye there had not scanned enviously and wonderingly her perfect
+beauty--from the clear-cut, exquisite face and bare, beautifully--shaped
+arms, to the graceful ankles, gleaming white as sculptured marble
+through the veiling hair.
+
+Mrs Jefferson first recovered speech.
+
+"Who is she?" she whispered eagerly.  "Not at our hotel I think.  Looks
+like a walking advertisement of a new hair restorer.  She'd be a fortune
+to them if she'd have her photograph taken so!"
+
+The newcomer meanwhile advanced and took one of the chairs near Mrs
+Jefferson.  That lady suffered strongly from the curiosity that is
+characteristic of her admirable nation.  She re-seated herself for the
+purpose of studying the strange vision, and, not being in the least
+degree afflicted with English reticence, she set the ball of
+conversation going by an immediate remark:
+
+"Had any of these baths before?"
+
+The person addressed looked at her with grave and serious eyes.
+
+"No," she said; and her voice was singularly clear and sweet, but with
+something foreign in the slow accentuation of words.  "I only arrived at
+this hotel last night."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, "is that so?  I thought I hadn't seen you
+before.  Come for your health?"
+
+"Yes," said the stranger, accepting a glass of water from the attendant,
+who had just come forward.
+
+"Not gout, I suppose?" suggested Mrs Jefferson, conscious that there
+were arched feet in the world even more exquisite in shape and size than
+her own.
+
+"Gout!  Oh, no!" said the stranger, smiling faintly.  "They say my
+nerves are not strong.  I sleep badly, I am easily startled, and easily
+fatigued."  She paused a moment, and one delicate hand, glittering with
+rings, pushed back the dark weight of rippling hair from her brow.  "I
+have had a great mental shock," she said, quietly.  "Such things require
+time... one cannot easily forget..."
+
+Her eyes had grown dreamy and abstracted.  The hand that had pushed back
+her heavy hair fell on her lap.  She looked at it and its shining rings,
+and Mrs Jefferson's sharp glance followed hers.  Was there a plain gold
+circlet among that glittering array?--was the beautiful stranger wife or
+maiden?
+
+"If any man saw her now!" she thought involuntarily.  "My!  I wouldn't
+give much for his peace of mind afterwards!  What owls she makes us all
+look!"
+
+"Nerves are queer things," she said aloud.  "Can't say I'm much troubled
+with them, except here," and she moved her foot explanatorily.  "Just
+that joint.  It's agony sometimes.  Suppressed gout, you know.  You
+wouldn't think so to look at it, would you?"
+
+"That the gout was--suppressed? certainly I should," answered the
+stranger, smiling.  "There is no external sign of it.  I always thought
+gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints."
+
+"So it does," said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the
+moist and crimson sufferer on her right.  "But my form of it is
+different.  It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it
+doesn't _look_ so bad as the other gout."
+
+"It is not often that people do sympathise with illness," said the
+beautiful woman.  "When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can't
+be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one
+else has to bear so much pain.  Human nature is essentially selfish.  It
+is a natural incident of living at all that we should estimate our own
+life as more important than our neighbours."
+
+"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "if we sacrificed it to them, it might
+be a doubtful benefit.  I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age
+of martyrs.  If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the
+faggot would have made me swear anything."
+
+"The history of religions is a very curious history," said the stranger
+in her low clear tones.  "Looked at dispassionately, it has done very
+little for mankind in general, save to prove one fundamental truth that
+is more significant than any doctrine or dogma.  That truth is the
+inherent need in all humanity of something to worship.  From the highest
+to the lowest degrees of civilisation that need has made itself the
+exponent of external forms.  It is the kernel of all religions."
+
+"A kernel that is surrounded with a very hard shell," said Mrs
+Jefferson glibly.  She liked discussions, and was accustomed to say she
+could talk on any subject--having indeed come from a country where women
+did talk on any subject, whether they were acquainted, with it or not.
+"I don't think there is much spirituality in any modern religion," she
+went on.  "I surmise it's dead.  Science has got the upper hand of
+theology and means to keep it.  People are not content now-a-days with
+being told `you must believe so and so.'  They want a reason for
+believing.  You're not a Romanist, are you?" she added suddenly.
+
+"I--oh no," said the stranger with a faint smile.
+
+"I'm glad of that, for I was just going to say that the Church of Rome
+has done more to retard rational and spiritual progress than any other.
+I don't believe in the voice of man barring the way to inquiry.  God
+made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them
+all on one pattern.  The offices and dignities they give themselves
+won't make them one whit greater or more important in His eyes."
+
+"You are a democrat, I see," said the beautiful woman, looking gravely
+and scrutinisingly at the eager flushed face, with its ruffled damp
+curls, and quick restless eyes.
+
+"Well," said Mrs Jefferson, "I don't exactly know what I am.  My views
+are liberal on most subjects.  I've travelled a good bit, and I think
+that enlarges the mind.  I've just run over to have a look at England.
+Our people are laughing at her pretty well.  The Gladstone party have
+made a lovely hash of affairs haven't they?  But perhaps you don't care
+for politics, being foreign."
+
+"Oh, yes, I do," answered her strange companion.  "And I am specially
+interested in English politics," she added.  "Like yourself I was
+curious to see a nation who seemed determined to court their own shame,
+and to deify the being whose career is signally marked by obloquy and
+disaster."
+
+"His day is pretty well over, I fancy," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly
+scenting an opportunity for a brilliant display of political knowledge.
+"That Irish business has settled him.  They call him the greatest
+statesman of the age!  A man at dinner last night was lauding him up to
+the skies.  There was quite a battle about him.  We showed, however,
+that, putting his talking powers aside, he really is no statesman--only
+a grasping selfish old bungler, who cares nothing for his country except
+it keeps him in office, and has done nothing really great or good during
+his whole career.  They make a fuss about the Education Act, but the
+credit of passing that belongs to Foster.  As for the Disestablishment
+of the Irish Church, that is a disgraceful business--a robbery of the
+dead who had left their money to support a faith they believed in.  He
+is responsible--to my thinking--for all the anarchy, confusion and
+misery in that poor unhappy Ireland.  I believe," and she leant forward
+and dropped her voice, "I believe that at heart the man is more than
+half a Romanist.  See how he has favoured the High Church party, and if
+ever he gives a clerical appointment it is always to a Ritualist priest.
+They don't call themselves _clergymen_ now.  Well," and she drew
+herself up once more, "I, for one, wouldn't like to have his sins on my
+shoulders.  I should think he ought to be haunted by as many victims as
+Napoleon Buonaparte.  What with financial humbug, war taxes--the
+blunders of the Alabama business--the disgrace and bloodshed of the
+Transvaal affair and the Egyptian war--crowned by the undying and never
+to be forgotten shame of Gordon's sacrificed life, I wonder he can lay
+down his head at night and sleep.  When he heard of that hero Gordon's
+death he should have taken a pistol and blown out his blundering brains.
+But perhaps," she added more calmly, "he was afraid of meeting his
+victims until he couldn't help himself.  However, he might have gone
+into one of those `retreats' his favourite Ritualists are so fond of,
+and spared England any more blunders and follies."
+
+"You are very bitter against him," said the stranger calmly.  "Be sure
+that his own actions will also be his own avengers.  Life would be made
+much more tolerable if we would only keep that fact before us.  To my
+mind there is no backbone or support in a religion that teaches
+irresponsibility.  That is the great fault of you Christians.  Your
+faith is not a thing you take hold of, and grasp and act upon.  Hence
+your many national disasters.  You shelve your future, or what you call
+your salvation, on the merits of a Sacrifice, and think yourselves
+relieved of all further trouble.  In the world, and in society, religion
+is a tabooed subject--it is only kept for Sundays and for churches.  I
+believe your clergy know no more of the _real_ doctrines of
+Christianity, those deep and _mystical_ truths underlying the teachings
+of Christ, than the child at his mother's knee.  I have been to your
+great cathedrals and churches.  I saw only lip-service and routine.  I
+heard only stale maxims, weak explanations of the allegories and
+parables that fill your Biblical records; flowing rhetoric and vague
+expressions of some undefinable joy and glory in an equally undefinable
+Hereafter, that was sometimes described as a place, and sometimes as a
+state.  That was all.  I feel such things cannot long stand against the
+tide of advancing thought.  Modern Christianity is not the Sermon on the
+Mount, and has little title to the name of its founder.  It has not a
+feather's weight of importance in the minds of the worldly, the
+fashionable, the pleasure-seeking; its sentiment is extinct, save in a
+few faithful ignorant hearts, who adore what they cannot comprehend, and
+live in a state of hope that all will come right in some vague future."
+
+The beautiful eyes had grown sad and thoughtful.  They rested on the
+eager wondering face before her, yet seemed to look through and beyond
+it, as the eyes of one who sees a vision that is mere airy nothingness
+to the surrounding crowd.
+
+"It will come right," she went on slowly and dreamily, "but not as men
+think, and not because the religion of earth teaches fear of punishment
+and hope of reward as the basis of spiritual faith.  No.  Something
+higher and holier and deeper than any motive of self-safety will perfect
+what is best in man and eliminate what is vile."
+
+"If that is so," interposed Mrs Jefferson, glibly, as she rose from her
+chair to proceed to the Second Room--"I guess man will want a pretty
+long time to `perfect' in.  I don't see how he's going to do it here."
+
+"I did not say `here,'" answered the stranger, in her slow, calm way, as
+she, too, rose and prepared to follow the little American.  "For what,
+think you, are the ages of Eternity intended?--sleep and dreams?"
+
+Mrs Jefferson gave a little shudder.  "I surmise we're getting a little
+too deep," she said.  "Let's keep to Gladstone and the Irish Question
+while the thermometer's at 110."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO.
+
+THE SECOND ROOM.
+
+The second room differed in no way from the first, except in the matter
+of heat.
+
+The beautiful stranger floated in--her face all the lovelier for the
+faint rosy flush that glowed through the clear skin.  If Mrs Ray
+Jefferson's admiration was envious, at least it was genuine.  She had
+never really believed in perfect feminine beauty before--beauty that
+shone supreme without the aid of dress and frippery--but here it was--a
+glowing and palpable fact.  The simple white drapery with its border of
+scarlet floated with the grace of its own perfect simplicity around that
+perfect form, and never was royal mantle more splendid than the rippling
+hair that crowned her head and fell in its luxuriance of curls and waves
+to her feet.  As they again seated themselves side by side, Mrs
+Jefferson remembered that she was not yet acquainted with the
+nationality of the stranger.  She hastened to repair the error of such
+ignorance.
+
+"You speak English wonderfully for a foreigner," she said; "it would
+puzzle anyone to make out where you were raised--Russian, I surmise?"
+
+"No," said the stranger, quietly, "though I have lived there a great
+deal.  It was my husband's country."
+
+Mrs Jefferson looked radiant.  She was married, then.  That was
+something to have learnt.  "_Was_,"--she said quickly, "Is he not living
+then?"
+
+"No."  The beautiful face grew a shade paler.  "I would rather not talk
+about it," she said.  "His death was very tragic and terrible."
+
+"I'm sorry," said the little American, with ready contrition; "don't
+think I'm curious," she added, suddenly, "but one doesn't see a woman
+like you every day.  I surmise you'll make a sensation in the hotel."
+
+"I have my own private rooms here," was the quiet response.  "I shall
+not mix with the other visitors."
+
+"Oh," cried Mrs Jefferson, her face clouding, "I call that cruel.
+There are really some very good people here--titles, if you like them--
+money, if you care for that--one or two geniuses--a musician and a poet
+who are working for a future generation, because they can't get
+appreciated here--and the usual crowd of mediocrities.  Oh, you really
+must come to our evenings; they'd amuse you immensely.  We're quite
+dependent on ourselves for society.  This is the dullest of dull holes,
+still we manage to get a bit spry not and then.  Now, you--why, if you'd
+only show yourself to be looked at, you'd be doing the whole hotel a
+good turn."
+
+The stranger shook her head.  "Society never amuses me," she said.  "It
+has nothing to offer that can rival the charms of books, art, and
+solitude.  I possess all three."
+
+Mrs Jefferson opened her eyes wide.  "The first and the last," she
+said, "are comprehensible as travelling companions, but what about the
+middle one?"
+
+"In my train I have a blind musician, whose equal I have never met, and
+a boy sculptor whose genius will one day astonish the world.  For
+myself, I paint and I write, and I have a store of books that will
+outlast the longest limit of companionship.  Can you tell me what better
+things the world will give?"
+
+Mrs Ray Jefferson murmured something vaguely about amusement and
+distraction.  She was growing more and more perplexed about this
+beautiful Mystery.  Anyone who travelled about with a train of
+attendants must surely be a princess at the very least.
+
+"Amusement!"--the stranger smiled.  "Does society ever _really_ give us
+that?  We have to smile when we are bored--to tell polite falsehoods
+every hour--to eat and drink when we would rather fast--to awake all
+sorts of evil passions in other people's minds if we are better-looking
+or better dressed, or more admired; and have them aroused in our own if
+we are _not_?  Does a ball amuse?  Does a dinner-party?  Does even a
+comedy, after the first quarter of an hour?  I can answer for myself in
+the negative, at all events."
+
+"Gracious!" exclaimed Mrs Jefferson wonderingly.  "You must be a
+strange person, and you look so young.  Why, I should have thought you
+were just the age for society?  Don't you care to be admired?"
+
+"Not in the least.  I have learnt the value of men's passions.  A quiet
+life is more wholesome and infinitely more contenting than anything
+society can offer."
+
+"For a time, perhaps; but it would become dull and monotonous, I should
+think."
+
+"Never, if you have the mind to appreciate it.  The companionship I
+value will always come to me.  I do not need to seek it in the world."
+
+"You are fortunate," said Mrs Jefferson, somewhat sarcastically.
+"Ordinary mortals have to take what they can get.  Still, I suppose such
+things are only a matter of personal disposition.  If one has the mood
+for enjoyment, one can find it anywhere; if not--well, a funeral or a
+comedy would be equally amusing."
+
+"I suppose," said the stranger, quietly, "you have the mood."
+
+"Well, I'm blessed with a pretty fair capacity for enjoying all that
+comes in my way," said the little American, frankly.  "I like studying
+human nature, even though I'm not clever enough to describe it.  It's
+like the critics, you know, who find it so powerful easy to cut up a
+book, yet couldn't write one themselves to save their lives.  Phew-ew!
+how hot it is here!  How do you contrive to look so cool?"
+
+"I can stand a great deal of heat," answered the other, tranquilly.  "I
+have Eastern blood in my veins, on my mother's side.  Is that the
+hottest room?" she added, nodding in the direction of the third doorway.
+
+"Yes.  I suppose you won't go there?  I never dare put my nose inside.
+It's enough to scorch the skin off you."
+
+"I don't suppose it can be hotter than the rooms in the East," answered
+the stranger, as she rose and moved towards it.  She stood for a moment
+looking in, then turned back and smiled at her late companion.  "Oh, I
+can bear it," she said, and disappeared from sight.
+
+The little American pouted and looked disturbed.  "What a shame!  I had
+ever so many more things to ask her," she said, "and to think, after
+all, I don't know her name, or even to what country she belongs, and I
+did so want the whole story pat for the _table d'hote_ dinner
+to-night...  Ready to be shampooed?--oh, yes, Morrison; I'm just about
+`done through;' I'm glad you can take me first."
+
+She rose abruptly and followed the attendant past the flushed and
+perspiring groups who were still comparing notes as to different
+ailments and degrees of moisture, occasionally holding out their arms
+for mutual inspection.
+
+"I wonder," she said to herself, "how that one woman manages to look so
+different.  Why, we get uglier and uglier, and she only more and more
+beautiful.  Perhaps she's a Rosicrucian!"
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE.
+
+THE COOLING ROOM.
+
+A long room, down the centre of which ran a row of couches; on either
+side were the dressing-rooms, curtained off from the main apartment by
+curtains of dark Oriental blue, bordered with dull red.  In the large
+bay window stood the dressing-tables and mirrors.
+
+Mrs Ray Jefferson had it all to herself, as, wrapped in an enormous
+sheet of Turkish towelling, she emerged from the processes of shampooing
+and douche.  She laid herself down on one of the couches, and the
+attendant, Morrison, threw another Turkish wrap over her, and left her
+to the enjoyment of the coffee she had ordered, and which was placed on
+one of the numerous small tables scattered about.
+
+According to all rules of the baths, she should have rested calmly and
+patiently on that couch, until such time as she was cool enough to don
+her ordinary attire, but the little American, was of a restless and
+impatient disposition, and of all things hated to be inactive.
+
+The attendant had scarcely left the room before she raised herself to a
+sitting position, and took a survey of her appearance in one of the
+mirrors.  It did not appear to be very satisfactory.  She turned
+abruptly away and reached some magazines from an adjoining table.  Armed
+with these she once more sought her couch, and after tossing two or
+three contemptuously aside, she at last seemed to find one periodical
+that interested her.  She grew so absorbed in its contents, that she
+scarcely heard the entrance of the beautiful woman who had so interested
+her, and who now took the next couch to her own, and lay down in an
+attitude of indolent grace that was quite in keeping with her
+appearance.
+
+"You seem interested," she remarked, as she glanced at the absorbed face
+of her neighbour.
+
+Mrs Jefferson looked up sharply.  "Well," she said, turning the
+magazine round to read its title.  "This is about the queerest story I
+ever read.  I wish people wouldn't write improbabilities that no one can
+swallow."
+
+"The question is rather what is an improbability?" answered her
+companion.  "It is only a matter of the capacity of the age to receive
+what is new.  A few years ago electricity was improbable, yet look at
+the telegraph and the telephone.  Still further back, who would have
+believed that railways would exist above ground and under ground, and
+mock at the difficulties of rivers and mountains?  What have you
+discovered strange enough to be called `improbable'?"
+
+"Oh! it's a story of a man who gets out of his own body and does all
+sorts of queer things, and then goes back to it again, just when he
+pleases.  Finally, he falls in love with a woman as queer as himself,
+and finding he has a rival, he just gets rid of him by force of
+will-power.  However, the day they are to be married, the woman is found
+dead in her bed.  It appears that she also could get out of her body
+when she felt inclined, but she did it once too often, and couldn't get
+back in time, so they buried her, at least they buried one of her
+bodies; as far as I can make out she had _two_."
+
+"And you think that improbable?" questioned the stranger calmly.
+
+Her beautiful deep eyes were looking straight into the flushed excited
+face beside her.  Mrs Ray Jefferson met their gaze, and was conscious
+of an odd little unaccountable thrill.
+
+"Certainly I do," she said.  "Who could believe that anyone can jump in
+or out of their skin just as the fancy takes them?"
+
+The stranger's beautiful lips grew scornful.  "Oh!" she said, "if you
+like to put the subject in that light, it may well look ridiculous and
+impossible.  Ignorance is always more or less arrogant.  It is man's
+habit to fancy that all creation was made for him.  There are few things
+of which he is so utterly ignorant, and of which he thinks so little, as
+that mystery of _himself_ incarnated in the temporary prison-house of
+flesh and blood.  Did he once realise what he might be--did he ever
+raise his eyes from the glow-worm light of earth to the stupendous
+glories of the sun of wisdom, he would know better than to cavil at what
+you call `improbable.'  For in nature all things are possible, but man
+has neither time nor patience to trace out their mysteries, or seek in
+their development the key to those mysteries."
+
+"Gracious sakes," muttered Mrs Jefferson to herself in alarm.  "I'm
+sure she's a Rosicrucian or something of that sort.  It's interesting,
+but uncanny.  I'm quite out of my depth.  I don't know what she means.
+Do you really mean to say," she added aloud, "that this story might be
+true; that you have two bodies and can slip from one to the other?"
+
+A dark frown crept over the beautiful face.  "You talk as foolishly as a
+child," she said with contempt.  "You know nothing of the subject you
+are discussing, therefore anything I might say would sound
+incomprehensible.  The grossness of the flesh stifles and kills the
+subtle workings of the spirit.  To you life is only a pleasure ground,
+and the more your own personal satisfaction is obtainable, the more you
+cling to its spurious enjoyments.  If you once cut yourself adrift from
+such follies, your eyes would be opened, your senses quickened, and you
+would recognise possibilities and marvels that now are no more to you
+than sunlight to the blind worm that burrows in the ground."  She
+stretched out her hand and took the book from the passive hand of her
+astounded companion, and glanced rapidly over its pages.
+
+"`Light in Darkness.'  Ah, truly it is needed," she said, her eyes
+kindling, her face glowing, until her beauty seemed more than mortal.
+"But we shall never reach it till we learn to master the senses, to cut
+the chains of worldly prejudice and conventionalism.  They are bold
+teachers, these," and she tossed the magazine back to the still silent
+critic of its contents.  "You would do well," she said, "to make
+yourself acquainted with some of these subjects.  I think you would find
+them more interesting than ball-rooms and Paris toilettes."
+
+Mrs Jefferson recovered her tongue at that slight to her beloved
+vanities.
+
+"Tastes differ," she said coolly.  "I'm very well content with the world
+as it is and with myself as I am.  I don't believe any good ever comes
+of prying into subjects we're not intended to know anything about."
+
+"I might ask you," said the stranger, with visible contempt, "how you
+are so surely convinced of what we are intended to know, and what not?
+There is no hard and fast rule laid down for us that I am aware of."
+
+"Oh!" stammered Mrs Jefferson, with some confusion, "I'm sure the Bible
+says that somewhere.  `Thus far shalt thou go and no further,' you know.
+It is arrogant to attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the other
+world.  When we go there we shall know them soon enough."
+
+"How glibly you nineteenth-century Christians talk of the `other
+world,'" cried the beautiful woman, with contempt.  She tossed back the
+weight of her rich hair and sat up, looking like an inspired prophetess.
+"Yet you acknowledge you know nothing of it.  Your priests cannot
+explain it, so they take refuge in the plea that inquiry is
+presumptuous.  Science cannot explain it.  Reason falters at the
+threshold before the stumbling-block of its long-cherished ignorance
+whose only legacy has been Fear.  And it is all because you live in
+falsehood--because you are false to your _inner_ life, and think only of
+the outer; because you are all in chains of superstition--of worldly
+bondage, of family prejudices, and, above all, of self-delusion."
+
+"Have you come to preach to us, then?" asked the little American
+superciliously.  "There is little use in decrying a private or national
+disease unless you are provided with a remedy."
+
+"If an angel from Heaven came down to preach you would not believe!"
+said the stranger, growing suddenly calm as she sank back on her pillow.
+"No, I have no mission.  I am only one who has looked out on life and
+learnt its bitter truths, and seen its vanity and folly repeated, with
+scarce a variation, in countless human lives."
+
+"Well," said the American, "the fact of that repetition seems rather as
+if it were a law of human lives, don't it?  We find ourselves in this
+world, and we must do as others do, and live as others live.  Of course,
+I've read of people giving up all sorts of pleasures and comforts in
+this life for sake of another, but to me it seems only a mild form of
+madness.  For instance, there's this new sect that's sprung up, who are
+going to revolutionise all creation--well, I've read heaps of their
+books, I've spoken even to some of their members, but I confess
+Theosophy seems as much of a jumble as any other creed.  Look at their
+priests, their _yogis_, and _chelas_, and such-like humbugs!  They say
+their Buddha is as divine as our Christ.  Maybe he is--to them!  But
+what strikes me is the absurdity of trying to get into another life
+while one has to live this.  Fasting and sitting under a tree, and
+starving out all fleshly desires and impulses until the human body,
+instead of being handsome and muscular as Nature intended it to be,
+becomes a withered skeleton, subsisting on a few beans and a cup of
+water.  Why, anybody could see visions and dream dreams, that lived a
+life like that even for a year!  But I want to know what's the good of
+it?  I suppose if we get out of our natural life before our time, our
+place can't be ready for us in our next Karma, or whatever they call it.
+So we would martyrise ourselves to no purpose.  These sort of people
+seem to me to be trying to steal a march over others, wanting to get a
+stage further on the road before the natural term of earth-life is over.
+A nice world this would be if we were all at that game."
+
+"You have certainly read to some purpose," said the stranger ironically.
+"It is interesting to hear the deepest philosophy that has ever
+occupied the human mind summed up and dismissed as ridiculous.  Let me,
+however, first point out a few mistakes in your judgment of this new
+`sect' as you call it.  In the first place it is not a sect in the
+common acceptation of the word, but rather a universal philosophy
+embracing all creeds, ranks, and denominations of men.  It lays not the
+slightest stress on any of its followers martyrising their bodies as you
+so glibly describe.  You might just as well say that the Christian
+religion is only carried out by monks and nuns, because certain
+enthusiasts prefer to cut themselves adrift from the vanities of life.
+In all ages and in all religions there have been such enthusiasts.  Even
+the prophets in your own Bible were men of this description, living in
+caves, subsisting only on the fruits and seeds of the earth, and giving
+themselves up to visions and dreams.  What else have your canonised
+Saints done?  Yet they are worshipped by a vast community of
+_apparently_ sensible beings, as holy.  It only shows that there are
+certain minds capable of penetrating the uselessness of a purely worldly
+existence, and finding it too hard to live a double life, that is to
+say, spiritual and material (a life only possible to the modern clergy),
+they seek refuge in seclusion and leave that outer life to those whom it
+satisfies and suits.  As to the selfishness of such isolation, that is a
+matter no alien mind can quite determine, for the greatest Example of
+the religious life was strangely indifferent to human ties, nor ever
+displayed the weakness of human affection for earthly relatives, thus
+seeming to show that it is no sin to sacrifice earthly ties for a higher
+and holier existence.  The disciples of the great Brotherhood are
+voluntary enthusiasts, free from the claims of human relationship, and
+offering themselves simply _as_ disciples.  They wrong no one by their
+choice.  As for your last remark about endeavouring to steal a march on
+our fellow-men by seeking a higher place in the next state of existence,
+before we have done with this, I can only ask you to study something of
+the laws and doctrines of theosophical philosophy before deciding such
+an event is possible."
+
+"Do you know much about them?" asked Mrs Jefferson curiously.
+
+"I know that they teach man the truest sense of his own responsibility.
+They prove to him an inexorable law by which he may lift himself from
+the level of the brute to the majesty of the God he now blindly
+worships."
+
+"But so does Christianity," exclaimed Mrs Jefferson astounded.
+
+For the first time the stranger laughed.
+
+"And is not true Christianity the highest and purest philosophy?" she
+said.  "Only it is preached--not practised.  Can you tell me that a
+single Christian land in this nineteenth century era is one whit purer
+or better in its spiritual or moral character than was Jerusalem a
+thousand years ago?  Does it influence commerce, trade, governments,
+laws--even civilisation?  If it did, not one rule or law that binds the
+rotten fabric of civilised life together would stand for a single
+moment.  Why?  Because no one would lie; no one would cheat; no one
+would murder, either wholesale because of country prejudices, or retail
+because of private animosities.  Everyone would be honest, charitable,
+merciful, and unselfish.  You cling to a Faith that is almost barren of
+good works.  You propagate it among ignorant savages whom you first rob
+of their lands, and then convert with guns and brandy bottles.  How much
+of the reception of Christianity is due to the _latter_ I will leave to
+the revelations of the first honest missionary whose report is not
+indebted to his income from the Society, a prospective pension, and his
+own personal weakness for the laudation of his fellow men.  Show me a
+human being who can be honest to a conviction in the face of scorn and
+mockery, who never sought his _own_ interest in the profession he
+embraced, but only the good of others for whom that profession was
+ostensibly established; who would speak truth in the Courts of Law, the
+House of Legislature, and the _salons_ of Society; who would write--not
+for empty praise but from conviction--and follow art simply and purely
+to ennoble the mind, not pander to the lust of the eye and the greed of
+gold.  Show me such men and such a nation, and I will acknowledge
+_there_ Christianity has found its seat and fulfilled the purpose of its
+founder!"
+
+"Oh," said the American, shrugging her shoulders with contempt, "of
+course, you are talking arrant nonsense!  The thing's impossible.  The
+world can't be turned into a monastery, and as long as people live they
+will always be overreaching each other, and deceiving each other.  It's
+not possible to be perfectly honest, or perfectly truthful."
+
+"Then," said the stranger quietly, as she sank back on her cushions, "do
+not blame even the poor _Yogi_ under his tree if he has turned away sick
+and disgusted with the shams and vileness, and hypocrisies and evil, of
+the so-called civilised world.  Remember that the country that holds him
+and thousands as foolish and superstitious, is the country that your
+boasted, civilisation has wrested from his race, and that _your_ example
+as a Christian nation is ever before his eyes.  Let his conduct
+determine it's influence!"
+
+"Well," said Mrs Jefferson, "talk of sermons in stones!  Here's one in
+baths!  I should like to know who you are.  Seems to me you know
+everything, and have read everything, and seen most everything on the
+face of the earth.  So few women begin to think of anything serious till
+they've forgotten their looks, that you must excuse my calling you an
+anomaly.  Now do tell me you'll change your mind and join us to-night in
+the drawing-room.  It's quite as selfish as _Yogaism_ to keep talents
+like yours in the background."
+
+The beautiful face grew cold and proud.
+
+"You must pardon me," she said, "if I venture to consider myself the
+best judge of what you are pleased to call--talents.  They are not of an
+order to benefit a hotel drawing-room."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, feeling somewhat snubbed.  "I'm sure people
+would be delighted to hear you talk, even if you did rub some of their
+pet foibles the wrong way.  I've quite enjoyed this morning, I assure
+you.  You've diverted my thoughts from my own ailments, and stimulated
+my digestion.  I feel like eating lunch for once.  And that reminds me I
+must begin to dress.  My fringe takes a quarter of an hour to arrange."
+
+She rose from the couch, her Turkish towelling drapery flowing far
+behind her small figure.  Then she disappeared into her dressing-room.
+
+When she emerged from thence, her fringe artistically curled, her face
+becomingly tinged with pearl-powder, her dress and appointments all
+combining to give her small person importance, and show a due regard to
+the exigencies of fashion, she found the couch which the mysterious
+stranger had occupied was vacant.  She loitered about in the hope of
+seeing her emerge from one of the dressing-boxes, but she was
+disappointed, and as the luncheon gong was sounding through the hotel
+she reluctantly took her way through the carpeted corridors and turned
+into the main entrance, her mind in a curious condition of perplexity
+and excitement.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR.
+
+CONJECTURES.
+
+Mrs Ray Jefferson, irrespective of a toilet of ruby velvet cut _en
+coeur_, and a display of diamonds calculated to make men thoughtful on
+the subject of speculation, and women envious on the subject of
+husbandly generosity (even when connected with Chemicals), was quite the
+feature of the Hotel drawing-room that night.  She was full of her
+adventure of the morning, and her description of the beautiful stranger
+lost nothing from the picturesque language in which she clothed her
+narrative.
+
+"It's very odd the Manager won't tell us her name," she rattled on.
+"I've done my level best to find out, but it's no good.  I suppose she
+pays too well for him to risk betraying her.  I'm sure she's a Russian
+Princess; she has a suite with her, and carries musicians and sculptors,
+and heaven knows who else, in her train."
+
+It may be noticed that Mrs Ray Jefferson had only heard of _a_ sculptor
+and _a_ musician, but she drifted into plurality by force of that
+irresistible tendency to exaggerate trifles which seems inherent in
+women who are given to scandal even in its mildest form.
+
+People from all parts of the room gathered round her.  A few seemed
+inclined to doubt her description of the stranger's personal charms, but
+when she applied to Mrs Masterman for confirmation, that lady, who was
+known to have a strict regard for truth in its most uncompromising form,
+emphatically agreed with her.
+
+"Beautiful!  I should think she was beautiful," she said, in her usual
+surly fashion.  "But,"--and then came a series of those curious and
+condemnatory phrases with which a woman invariably finishes her praise
+of another woman's beauty, and which are too well known to be repeated.
+
+"I did my best to try and persuade her to join us," continued Mrs
+Jefferson, after duly agreeing with Mrs Masterman that perhaps the
+stranger's hair was a shade too black, and her height too tall, and her
+complexion too pale--and that there _was_ something uncanny in the
+expression of the dark wild eyes, "more like the eyes of a horse than a
+human being," was Mrs Masterman's verdict.  "But nothing would induce
+her.  She says Society is all a sham.  That we don't really amuse
+ourselves or enjoy ourselves, however much we pretend to!  My word!
+doesn't she give it hot to everything.  Policy, religion, diplomacy,
+worldliness, theology, art.  It seems to me she knows everything, and
+has studied human life more accurately than the wisest philosopher I've
+ever heard of."
+
+"And did you discuss all those subjects during the course of a Turkish
+Bath?" said a voice near her.
+
+Mrs Jefferson started.  The gentleman who had spoken was a recent
+arrival.  She only knew him as Colonel Estcourt.  He was a singularly
+interesting-looking man, home from India on sick leave, and the maidens,
+and wives, and widows, of this polyglot assemblage at the Hotel were all
+inclined to admiration of his physical perfections, and to
+dissatisfaction at a certain coldness and disdainfulness of themselves,
+which, to use their mildest form of reproach, was "odd and unmilitary."
+
+Mrs Jefferson started slightly.  "Oh, it's you, Colonel," she said.
+"Yes, we did talk about all those subjects, and I surmise if all of you
+people here heard her carry on against the way you live your lives,
+you'd feel rather small."
+
+"Did you?" asked Mrs Masterman unkindly.
+
+The bath had not improved _her_ complexion, and her left foot was
+paining her excessively.  These two facts had not combined to sweeten
+the natural acerbity of her temper.  Mrs Ray Jefferson did not heed the
+question, or the smile it provoked on one or two feminine lips.
+
+"I should like to know who she is," she persisted.  "She's been in India
+too.  I suppose you never met her, Colonel Estcourt?  No one could
+forget her who had!"
+
+That cold impassive face changed ever so slightly.  "India," he said,
+"is a somewhat vague term, and covers a somewhat large area for a
+possible meeting-place.  Your description, Mrs Jefferson, is
+tantalising in the extreme to a male mind, but I fail to recognise its
+charming original as any personal acquaintance."
+
+"I suppose so," said the little American, discontentedly.  "I'm just
+dying to know who she is, and therefore no one can tell me.  Seems I
+shall have to call her `the Mystery,' until she condescends to throw off
+this _incognita_ business."
+
+"But we are sure to see her," interposed Orval Molyneux, the young poet.
+"She must go out sometimes, I suppose."
+
+"If you'll take my advice," said Mrs Jefferson brusquely, "you won't
+try to see her, for it's my belief that she's not the woman any man can
+look at and forget, and you poets are mostly impressionable."
+
+"Such a warning is only adding zest to temptation," said Colonel
+Estcourt, with a grave smile.  "You _really_ have aroused my curiosity
+in no small degree.  But perhaps the mysterious beauty may not be so
+obdurate as you imagined.  Why should she not show herself among us?  It
+is contrary to all known rules of Nature for a beautiful woman to hide
+herself from the admiration her charms would exact.  When those charms
+are coupled with mental gifts of so diverse and unusual a nature as Mrs
+Jefferson has described, the probability is that seclusion is only a
+whim, unless indeed--"
+
+He broke off abruptly.  A certain look of disturbance and perplexity
+came into his deep grey eyes.
+
+"Unless what?" queried Mrs Jefferson, sharply.  "You look as if you saw
+a vision.  Unless she's committed a crime, were you going to say?  She
+talked of some tragedy--something that had upset her life, and affected
+her mental equilibrium."
+
+"She said--that?"  His face grew suddenly very pale.  The firm mouth
+quivered beneath the fair thick moustache that shaded it.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs Jefferson.  "Do tell, Colonel.  What is it you suspect?
+A mystery--a secret crime?  My, that would be interesting."
+
+"Suspect!" he said, almost fiercely.  "How should I suspect?  What do
+you mean?  I was only wondering if indeed she possessed one of those
+rare minds, sufficient for their own happiness, and living an inner life
+of which the world knows nothing, and which, even if it knew, it could
+not comprehend."
+
+"Ah," said Mrs Jefferson, quickly.  "Now this gets interesting.  That's
+just the sort of way she talked, and I confess I got a bit out of my
+depth.  But you, Colonel, you've come from the very land of it all.  Do
+sit down and explain.  Is the world going to be turned upside down?  Are
+we to have a new religion, or rather an old one brought to light, that
+will upset what we've been hugging as truth for the last eighteen
+hundred years.  We've been pretty crazy over spiritualism on our side of
+the water, but I guess this new philosophy can just make our mediums and
+_seance_-givers take a back seat.  Isn't that so?"
+
+"My dear madam," answered Colonel Estcourt, gravely, "you really must
+not call upon me to expound the doctrines of the East to the scoffers of
+the West.  I know a little--a very little--of this school of philosophy;
+but I am not vain enough to attempt an explanation of its profound
+wisdom.  The mysteries of Nature demand the deepest and most earnest
+consideration of the human mind.  Do you think I could presume to rattle
+off a few explanations or give the key to certain problems just to
+satisfy the vague curiosity of an idle hour.  I will only say one
+thing--it is a thing that cannot be too often repeated and thoroughly
+kept in memory.  Every life has to live out itself, and work out for
+_itself_ the higher mysteries that are shut within its own
+consciousness.  No one can do that for it, any more than they could take
+its love, or its sorrows, or its misfortunes away, and bear them in its
+place.  If humanity took that truth to heart, and lived according to the
+higher instead of the lower instincts, the world would be a very
+different place."
+
+"But," objected a pretty feminine voice in the back-ground, "what about
+the obligations of position and society?  I suppose the `higher
+instinct' would tell us that amusements are a waste of time--vanity and
+vexation in fact--yet even they have a good result, they give
+employment, and help other folk to live.  And it's a pleasant relief to
+be gay and frivolous.  It's awfully fatiguing to be grave and good.
+Just look at us on Sundays.  We're all more or less cross and
+disagreeable, and I'm sure no clergyman could honestly say that he
+wasn't heartily sick of droning and intoning that same eternal form
+embodied in the Church Service."
+
+"The higher life," said Colonel Estcourt, gravely, "is not a matter of
+form.  Far from it.  It is an unceasing and inexhaustible pursuit; it
+has infinite gradations, and is full of infinite possibilities.  Its
+tendency is to elevate all that is best, and eliminate all that is
+worst, in man."
+
+"Oh!" cried Mrs Jefferson with rapture, "I'm sure you ought to meet my
+`Mystery.'  That's just her sort of talk.  I must say it sounds
+beautiful; but I shouldn't think it was practicable.  It's a very hard
+thing to change people's ideas.  When they've held them a certain time
+they get used to them, and don't like the trouble of altering."
+
+"True," said Colonel Estcourt, "and therein lies the secret of all the
+misery and mistakes that have made the world what it is.  The few
+enthusiasts and propagandists have always been confronted by that
+mountain of inertness, prejudice, and indolence, which the aggregate
+portion of all nations oppose to anything newer, or wiser, or better
+than the sloth and ignorance of the past."
+
+"Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "let's see what this new era will bring
+about.  There's a grand opening for it, and it has this advantage--
+people are much more dissatisfied with old creeds, and much more eager
+for new, than they have ever been.  The reins are slack, if only there's
+a firm and judicious hand to seize them."
+
+"Suppose," drawled Mr Ray Jefferson, who had the rare virtue of being
+an admirable listener to any controversy or discussion.  "Suppose, my
+dear, we have a game of poker."
+
+"Agreed," laughed his wife.  "This meeting's adjourned, Colonel
+Estcourt.  Will you join us."
+
+He shook his head.  "No," he said, "I'm going out on the terrace to
+smoke."
+
+"And meditate on the Unknown?" queried the little American.  "Perhaps
+you'll see her at her window.  I wish you luck."
+
+He did not answer, but his brow clouded and his face grew anxious and
+absorbed.  In his heart those light words echoed with a thrill of
+mingled pain and dread.  "If it should be," he said to himself.  "My
+God--if it should be she?"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE.
+
+"LOVE."
+
+The stars were gleaming above the dusky pine trees.  The soft December
+air, mild as spring on that sheltered coast, scarcely stirred the
+drooping boughs that overshadowed the terrace.  Colonel Estcourt lit his
+cigar, and began to pace with slow and thoughtful steps beneath the many
+lighted windows of the great building.  Mrs Jefferson's words haunted
+him, despite his efforts to dispel them.  One of those windows belonged
+to the room where this strange and beautiful woman might even now be
+seated.  Why did he picture to himself the pale exquisite face--the full
+dark eyes--the lovely rippling hair--as if they were charms already
+recognised and remembered.  Why?--save that when he had heard their
+description they had struck home to his memory with a shock of pain, and
+a feverish dread that longed yet feared to find itself realised.  To and
+fro--to and fro--he paced the terraced walk, and again and again his
+eyes sought that long line of light above his head.
+
+There was a strange stillness in the brooding air--that mysterious hush,
+which is the music of night's gentle footsteps, and insensibly its
+soothing influence stole over the unquiet of his restless thoughts--the
+warring powers of soul and sense grew silent and at rest.
+
+Then something--a sound sweet as song--yet without the vibratory passion
+of a human voice--seemed to float out of the darkness and hold his ear
+enchained like a spell.  It was the divinest beauty of music, divinely
+interpreted, and it seemed to him as he listened that all the discord
+and woe and misery that oppressed his earthly senses, disappeared and
+died away into the very perfection of peace.
+
+He stood there quite silent--quite motionless--waiting, so it seemed to
+himself, for some fuller revelation to which these exquisite sounds were
+but a prelude.
+
+It was a matter of no surprise when he quietly lifted his dreamy glance
+to the stone balcony above, and saw there, in the soft glow of light
+from the rooms beyond, the fair form of the woman he had expected to
+see.
+
+A faint tremor of fear and apprehension thrilled his heart, but it died
+away as a low remembered voice stole through the space that parted him
+from a visible form he had never thought to see again.
+
+"I told you we should meet.  But I scarcely thought it would be so soon.
+Will you come up here, or shall I join you?"
+
+The voice and greeting roused him.  He bared his head and bent low to
+the speaker in a deeper homage than that of conventional courtesy.
+
+"Is it really you, Princess?  And may I be permitted to join you?"
+
+The mute sign of assent showed him also a flight of steps leading up
+from the terrace to the balcony.  A moment, and he was by her side.
+
+No ordinary greeting passed between them.  Perhaps none could have
+conveyed what that long silent gaze did; seeming to go straight to the
+heart of each, full of memories that time had softened, but sad with the
+sadness that is in all deep human love.
+
+"A strange meeting-place," she said.  "Yet why more strange than the
+mountains of the East, or the lonely plains of the Desert, the steppes
+of Russia, or the house-tops of Damascus?"
+
+"You read my thoughts, as ever," he said.  "I must confess that it
+seemed strange to see you here, treading the narrow path of English
+conventionalism, after--after--"
+
+"I know," she said.  "But life is full of the unexpected.  You do not
+ask how these five years have been spent.  The years that have changed
+the dreamy enthusiastic girl into a woman such as you see before you."
+
+"I do not ask," he said, his voice vibrating beneath an emotion he could
+not conceal, "because it can be no pleasure to me to learn.  Do you
+forget what I told you?  Do you think that the memory of these five
+years is a pleasant one for me?  Against my prayers, against my
+warnings, you chose your own life.  Are you free--now?"
+
+"No," she said, in a strange stifled voice, "never _that_--never while I
+wear the shackles of humanity!"  She sank suddenly down in a low seat,
+and buried her face in her hands.  "Oh," she cried, faintly, "if I could
+tell you--if I only dared; but I cannot!  My bondage is deeper--my
+chains are heavier.  Sometimes I think those years were only a dream--a
+horrible, frightful dream--but then, again, I _know_ they were not."
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this
+shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common
+weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to
+the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood.
+
+"I cannot tell you," she said, "I dare not."
+
+"Do you forget," he said, severely, "that if I _wish_ to know, I shall
+learn it?"
+
+"Not now," she said, suddenly, and raised her face and looked calmly,
+yet not defiantly, back at him with her great, sad, and most lovely
+eyes.  "I have passed beyond your power," she went on.  "Beyond most
+human influence, I might say--" then she shuddered and her eyes sank
+again.  "But oh!" she cried, "at what a cost!--at what a cost!"
+
+He felt as if his heart grew suddenly chill and stony.  "I believe you
+are right," he said; "my power is gone--yours is the strongest now."
+
+He was silent for a few moments.  "One question only," he then said; "I
+don't wish to pry into your past.  It is enough that we have met--for
+that would never have taken place if you had not needed me.  So much I
+know.  Your marriage--was it as I foretold?"
+
+"It was worse," she said, bitterly--"a million times worse!  Body and
+soul, how I have suffered!  And yet, as I told you then, _it had to
+be_."
+
+"I did not believe it then," he said stormily; "I refuse to believe it
+now.  Your misery was self-created.  You voluntarily degraded yourself.
+What result could there be?  Only suffering and shame."
+
+"The good of others," she answered mournfully.  "You cannot see it yet;
+but I know--it was foretold me.  I did my work there.  Sometimes I hope
+it is finished; but I do not know.  One can never tell; at any time the
+summons may come again.  God help me if it does."
+
+"Is your life in danger, then?" he asked, and again that chill and
+horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.
+
+"My life!"  She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something
+intensely mournful in her gaze.  "As if _that_ mattered!  What is my
+life to me now, any more than it was then?  Did I count the cost--did I
+call it a sacrifice?  Life--the mere material actual life of the body--
+has never weighed with me for one moment.  And yet," she added, in a
+dull, strange voice, "I failed at the crucial test!  Failed!--I, who had
+denied to myself all woman's weakness, all mortal love, all fleshly
+vanities--failed!  I am no more now than the veriest beginner on the
+path.  I, who deemed myself so wise!"
+
+Then she rose and came close to him, and laid her white hand on his arm.
+"That," she said, "is why I needed you again.  You can help me--you can
+tell me where and how I failed."
+
+That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery.  He bent his head and
+passionately kissed the white, soft hand.  "You failed, oh, my Princess!
+because you are still mortal woman.  Thank Heaven for it!  You failed
+because memory and love were still strong in your heart.  You failed--
+and I am by your side once more.  Oh, let the past be forgotten!  Brief
+is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once
+strayed.  Fate stayed them on the threshold.  But now--now--"
+
+She raised her white face.  "Do not deceive yourself," she said.  "You
+have always loved me too well--but I--"
+
+"Only _let_ me love you!" he whispered passionately.  "It is honour
+enough.  All the wide earth holds no other woman such as you.  Having
+once known you, there has never been a disloyal thought within my heart.
+Read it--see for yourself."
+
+"I read it," she said, "even while the music was sounding in your ears,
+as you stood on the terrace there below; even while you moved amidst
+that chattering, flippant throng, and heard what they said of me.  No,
+dear friend.  You have nothing in that great frank, loyal soul to hide.
+But I--there is something that whispers I shall only bring you
+suffering.  I am not for mortal love.  True, I cannot see beyond, but
+Fear meets me on the threshold.  The hour I gave myself to you would
+bring you an evil I dimly realise.  I cannot foretell, and I cannot
+avert it; but it is there.  It lurks like a hidden foe where our lives
+should join...  No, no!--do not tempt me.  Happiness is not for me, as
+we count it on the earth plane."
+
+"And in the next I may lose you altogether.  Oh listen--listen, and let
+the woman defy the priestess.  Give me your love, and, even with Death
+as its bridal gift I shall receive it as the deepest joy of earth."
+
+"There," she said sadly, "speaks the mortal.  Passion sways your senses.
+You too will lose your powers--and for what?--a few brief years of
+joy--a longer darkness--then the old weary round--the old sad effort to
+climb the long stairway from the bottom rung that once you proudly
+spurned.  It was not this that Channa taught us in the sweet peace of
+our youth--it was not this for which our souls thirsted, and to which
+our faces were set."
+
+"Channa is dead, and to the dead all is peace.  Even he said that Life's
+one good gift was Love."
+
+"True, but not selfish love.  `The feet of the soul must be washed in
+the blood of the heart.'  Love to all humanity--to the poor--the sad--
+the suffering.  Love, even to the Fate that gives us sorrow and
+misfortune.  Love to the eternal and immutable.  Love for all that is
+purest and best in each life with which we mingle.  Such a love is not
+sensual--not earthly.  It gives without necessity of return; it is the
+soul's devotion, not the heart's impulse.  But you are not content with
+loving me, you claim mine in return, and so far as I have lost or you
+have gained a firmer foothold since last we met, so far you can compel
+my lower nature to answer yours.  We have loved before, and unhappy was
+our fate.  Once more we meet, and your cry is still for me.  And I--"
+
+She ceased; her arms fell to her side.  Her face, lovely beyond all mere
+mortal loveliness, looked back to his yearning, passionate gaze.  Had
+she been temptress, devil, saint, there could have been but one answer
+from the throbbing heart and leaping pulse of manhood.  He caught her to
+his heart, and his lips drank from hers the sweetness that only earthly
+passion drains from earthly love.
+
+She did not resist.  She lay there like a white lily in the moonlight,
+but her lips were cold as marble and her eyes held the mute sorrow of
+despair, not the rapture of a granted joy.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX.
+
+ENCHANTMENT.
+
+When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with
+a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom
+coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.
+
+The Princess Zairoff, to whom men's admiration was as familiar as the
+air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as
+dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of
+tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her
+strange nature, to any beseechment.
+
+But now, for one brief hour she threw back the portals of emotion.  She
+was a woman, pure and simple.  The man beside her was the one man in the
+world to whom her memory had been faithful.  Boy and girl they had known
+each other in years long past.  As boy and girl they had shared in the
+same tastes, and been penetrated with the same desires for the Mystic
+and the Unknown.
+
+Living in a remote part of India under very careless guardianship, and
+with no one to care for their pursuits, or remark them, they had made
+the acquaintance of a learned and somewhat mysterious native, and from
+his lips they first heard some hints of the wonders that nature reveals
+to the earnest student.  As time went on they were separated--the boy
+was sent to England, the girl remained in the East.  When they met again
+he was a young lieutenant in an infantry regiment stationed at one of
+the most popular stations of a popular Presidency, and she was the
+reigning queen of the same station.  Again fate parted them.  Two years
+went by.  Their next meeting was in Egypt, where she was travelling with
+her guardian.
+
+Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart's secret by then, but there was a
+coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood's
+friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of
+love-making.
+
+Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those
+talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and sex, and, however
+much the young man's heart might throb with its hidden passion, there
+yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely
+strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished
+devotion.
+
+Another separation--another meeting.  Time had worked changes in both.
+She was a beautiful woman, proud, cold, queenly--he had acquired
+strength of character, loftier ideals, and a sense of the value of
+intellectual gifts, which had kept him singularly free from and
+indifferent to, the temptations of the senses.  He had learnt to drink
+mental stimulants with avidity.  He had made one or two brilliant
+successes in literature, and was looked upon as a supremely "odd fish,"
+by his brother officers.
+
+That third meeting decided his fate.  He spoke out his love, spurred on
+by a rivalry he had good cause to dread, but spoke to no purpose.
+Calmly, though with a sorrow she did not attempt to disguise, she told
+her old playmate and friend that her choice was made.  She was going to
+marry the old, vicious, and fabulously wealthy Russian Prince, Fedor
+Ivanovitch Zairoff.  She made no pretence of caring for the man whom,
+out of a host of suitors, she had selected to wed.  When her young lover
+stormed and upbraided her she only raised those wonderful stag-like eyes
+to his face and said:
+
+"I have a reason, Julian.  I cannot explain it.  I dare not say more.
+Believe me I could not make you happy, _it would not be permitted_."
+
+And having long ago learnt that arguments were utterly useless before
+_that_ formula, he had to stand aside--to crush back a strong and
+unconquerable passion--to see her pass from his sight and knowledge--and
+to bear his life as best he could, with that feeling in his heart of
+having staked all on one throw, and lost, that makes so many men
+desperate and vicious.  That it did not make Julian Estcourt so was
+entirely due to great strength of moral character, and a belief in the
+responsibilities with which life is charged, and for the abuse of which
+it is destined to suffer in future states or conditions, as well as in
+its present.
+
+If such belief were universally accepted and pursued, we should soon
+cease to hear those ridiculous and humiliating phrases with which
+popular favourites are extenuated for the reckless and disgraceful waste
+of mind, energy, and usefulness, occasioned by some trifling
+disappointment or misfortune.  There would be no more sins glossed over
+as "sowing wild oats," and "having his fling," or "driven to the bad,"
+because once an individual feels he is responsible to _himself_ for
+undue physical indulgences--for laws of natural life set at naught, and
+spiritual impulses disregarded--he will try to emerge from the slough of
+evil, and he will learn with startling rapidity to value all joys of the
+senses less and less.  There can be no high order of morality without
+this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his
+own character, forming, as it were, fresh links in the chain of
+endurance, adding by every act and thought and word to that personality
+he is bound to confront as _himself_, to re-inhabit as himself, and to
+judge as himself, then life rises into an importance that words cannot
+convey, but which the soul alone recognises and feels in those better
+moments that are mercifully granted to each and all of us.
+
+So Julian Estcourt took up his burden--saddened, aged, embittered
+perhaps, but not one whit more inclined to squander the gifts of life or
+the fruits of discipline than he had been in his dreamy, studious youth.
+
+He neither sought distraction in evil and dissipated courses, nor death
+by any of those foolhardy and rash exploits which have far too often
+been glorified as "courage" or "pluck."
+
+He was graver, more reticent, more studious than of yore, and he found
+his reward, though few even of his intimate associates were aware of his
+abnormal gifts, or his superior knowledge.  Such was the man who, still
+in the prime of life's best years, still with thirst unslaked for that
+one divine draught of love which, once at least, is offered to mortal
+lips, stood now in the soft December moonlight by the side of the woman
+he had worshipped for long in secret and in pain, and cried aloud in
+triumph to his heart, "At last happiness is mine!"
+
+His whole consciousness was pervaded with a sense of ecstasy that seemed
+to make all past pain and regret sink into utter insignificance.  To
+stand there by her side, to drink in that wonderful beauty of face and
+form, was a joy that brought absolute forgetfulness of everything
+outside and apart from its new and magical acquisition.  The world was
+forgotten.  Even the possibility of a formal and imperative ceremonial
+by which his newly-won treasure must be secured to himself at last,
+barely flashed across his consciousness.  He did not trouble himself to
+put it into words.  He listened to the brief disjointed fragments of her
+speech--fragments which gave a dim picture of her life in these empty
+years of division.  Now and then he spoke of himself.  She listened.
+Once she turned to him with an impulse of tenderness strange in one so
+cold and self-possessed.
+
+"Ah!" she cried, softly, "I have made you suffer... but it was not my
+will...  Oh, always believe that...  And I will give you compensation.--
+I can promise it--now."
+
+They seemed to him the sweetest words that ever fell from mortal lips,
+and no less sweet--though infinitely puzzling--was that exquisite
+humility with which she crowned the wonder of her self-surrender.  Yet
+even as he heard his brain grew bewildered--his senses seemed to reel.
+Strange thoughts and shapes seemed to hover around him, and all the
+soft, dim space of night appeared a black and peopled horror.  For a
+moment he felt that consciousness was forsaking him... that the shock of
+this unexpected joy was beyond his strength to bear.  Dizzy and sick he
+swayed suddenly forwards.--A cool hand touched his brow--a voice reached
+his ear.  With a mighty effort he shook off the paralysing weakness, and
+sank down by the side of his enchantress.
+
+"Is it a dream?" he murmured, vaguely; "shall I wake to-morrow and know
+you have mocked me again?"
+
+"Nay, my beloved," she whispered; "this--is no dream...  Never again
+shall I mock you.  I am but a woman now who loves.  Earth holds no
+weaker thing."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+When Julian Estcourt entered the public drawing-room, nearly two hours
+after he had left it, several curious eyes turned towards him.  The
+card-players had finished their game and broken up into various groups.
+A few men were yawning and apparently meditating a retreat to the
+smoking-room.  No one seemed particularly energetic, but the entrance of
+that tall soldierly figure struck a new note of interest in the languid
+assemblage.  He seemed to bring--as it were--a breeze of vitality, a
+sense of freshness and energy along with him from the starlit air and
+the pine-scented woods.  His head was erect, his eyes shone with the
+radiance of happiness, a certain sense of pride--of triumph--and yet of
+deep intense content, was in his aspect and his smile.
+
+Mrs Ray Jefferson, her spirits still unimpaired by losses at "poker,"
+was the first to remark audibly on the change.
+
+"Why, Colonel!" she said.  "Have _you_ been having a Turkish Bath?
+Guess you look as fresh and perky as if you'd taken a new lease of
+life."
+
+He laughed.  "The only bath I have taken," he said, "is one of
+moonlight.  You should all be out on the terrace.  Far healthier and
+more enjoyable than these hot, gas-lit rooms, I assure you."
+
+"The terrace," said Mrs Jefferson, looking at him with a sudden stern
+accusing glance.  "Ladies and gentlemen, what did I tell you?  I--do--
+believe--"
+
+She paused dramatically, every eye turned fully and searchingly upon the
+handsome face and erect figure so calmly and easily confronting this
+sudden criticism.
+
+"Well?" he said at last.  "What is it you believe?"
+
+"You've seen--her," burst out Mrs Jefferson eagerly.  "Now Colonel, no
+tricks--plain yes or no; I'm certain sure you've seen her--my Mystery.
+Haven't you?"
+
+"I will not pretend," he said, "to misunderstand you.  I have met an old
+friend, and I hope soon to have the pleasure of introducing her to you
+all.  Not with any mystery about her, as our American friend seems
+determined to suppose, but simply as the Princess Zairoff--of whom you
+may have heard before this."
+
+There was a buzz--a stir--a confused murmur.  "Heard of her--I should
+think so.  You never mean to say she's _here_?  I thought she was in
+Russia--"
+
+"Gracious!" almost shrieked Mrs Jefferson.  "Why it was her husband who
+died so mysteriously, on the eve of that awful conspiracy.  You never
+mean to say, Colonel Estcourt, that you know her.  Why she's one of the
+celebrities of Europe, and to come here, to this quiet place--and
+_incognito_?"
+
+"Do you not think," he said, "that the fact of being quiet and unknown
+would just be the one fact she would appreciate?  I hope I am not
+claiming too much from your courtesy when I say that the privilege of
+her society can only be obtained by a due regard to her wishes in that
+respect.  She wishes only to be known as Madame Zairoff, here."
+
+"I'm sure," exclaimed Mrs Jefferson eagerly, "I'm only too willing to
+promise anything for the privilege of seeing her.  Isn't that the
+general opinion also?"
+
+There was a murmur of assent, specially eager on the part of the men.
+
+"I can only assure you," continued Colonel Estcourt gravely, "that you
+will not regret the slight inconvenience of repressing personal
+curiosity, for Madame Zairoff is a woman whose gifts and graces are of a
+marvellous nature and calculated to delight the most critical society.
+As Mrs Jefferson told us, she is here for her health.  It is an
+incident we cannot deplore if we are to benefit by her society."
+
+"You'd better all look out for your hearts, gentlemen," laughed Mrs
+Jefferson gaily and excitedly.  "I assure you I don't believe there's
+another woman in the world like her.  I've seen her under trying
+circumstances, and I give you my word of honour that a woman who can
+preserve any charm of personal appearance under the ordeal of a Turkish
+Bath--"
+
+There came a discreet little cough from the neighbourhood of Mrs
+Masterman.  The little American stopped abruptly.
+
+"I'd best say no more," she said.  Then she laughed.  "All the same, if
+you only could see us--"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN.
+
+CURIOSITY.
+
+There was suppressed but general excitement throughout the hotel all the
+next day.
+
+Someone had caught sight of the Princess Zairoff, who had driven out
+after luncheon in a low open carriage with three horses harnessed
+abreast in Russian fashion, that went like the wind.  Colonel Estcourt
+was beside her, and curiosity was rife as to how he should have known
+her, and whether accident only was responsible for the meeting of two
+people, one of whom had come from Russia, and the other from India, to
+this prosaic English nook, _for their health_.
+
+Mrs Masterman sniffed ominously, as one who scents scandal and
+impropriety in facts that do not adapt themselves to every-day rules of
+life.  A few other women, suffering from one or other of the fashionable
+complaints in vogue at this season, agreed with her, that "it certainly
+looked very odd."  They did not specify the "it," but they were quite
+convinced of the oddity.  It did not occur to them to reflect that there
+was not the slightest reason for any mystery on the part of the
+Princess, she being perfectly free and untrammelled, or that Colonel
+Estcourt had been singularly gloomy and depressed before Mrs
+Jefferson's graphic description of the mysterious beauty attracted his
+notice.
+
+There is a certain class of people who always shake their heads, and
+purse up their lips, at the mere suggestion of "chance," or "accident,"
+having a fortunate or happy application.  They do not apply the same
+train of reasoning to the reverse side of the picture; the bias of their
+nature is evidently suspicious.  These are the minds that refuse to
+credit those little misfortunes of picnic and pleasure parties, by which
+young people lose themselves in mysterious ways, and get into wrong
+boats and carriages, and generally contrive to upset the plans of their
+elders, when these plans have been framed with a deeper regard for
+rationality than for romance.  Mrs Masterman belonged to this class,
+which doubtless has its uses, though those uses are not plainly evident
+on the surface of life; she spent the day in gloomy hints, and
+mysterious shakes of the head, and insinuations that no good was ever
+known to spring from a superabundance of feminine charms, which, in the
+course of nature, must have an evil tendency, and be productive of
+overweening vanity, extravagance, and even immorality.
+
+Still, even evil prognostications cannot quell the fires of curiosity in
+the female breast, and every woman in the hotel made her toilette with
+special care on this eventful evening, as befitting one who owed it to
+her sex to vindicate even the smallest personal attraction in the
+presence of rivalry.  Colonel Estcourt was not at dinner, so his
+presence did not restrain comment and speculation, and the tongues did
+quite as much work as the knives and forks.
+
+"I do wonder what sort of gown she'll wear," sighed Mrs Ray Jefferson,
+who was attired in a "creation" of the great French man-milliner,
+accursed by husbands of fashionable wives, and whose power is only
+another note in that ascending scale of absurdity struck by the hands of
+fashion.
+
+"Perhaps she won't come down in the drawing-room at all," said Mrs
+Masterman spitefully, after listening for some time to the remarks
+around her.  "Colonel Estcourt did not specify any particular night."
+
+"Oh, I'm sure she'll come," said Mrs Jefferson, whose nature was
+specially happy in always assuring her of what she desired.  "I've got
+an impression that she will--they never fail me.  You know I've a
+singularly magnetic organisation.  A great spiritualist in Boston once
+told me I only needed developing to exhibit extraordinary powers.  But I
+hadn't the time or the patience to go in thoroughly for psychic
+development.  Besides it's really a very exacting pursuit."
+
+"Exacting rubbish!" exclaimed Mrs Masterman impatiently; "I can't stand
+all that bosh about higher powers, and developing magnetism.  Of course
+there are a set of people who'd believe anything that seemed to give
+them a superior organisation; it's only another way of pandering to
+human vanity.  Spiritualism is perfect rubbish.  I've seen and heard
+enough of it to know.  I once held a _seance_ at my house, just to
+convince myself as to its being a trick or not, I was told that the
+medium could materialise spirit forms.  I, of course, asked some people
+to meet him, and we selected a room and put him behind a screen as he
+desired, and there we all sat in the dark, like so many fools, for about
+half-an-hour.--"
+
+"Well," interposed Mrs Jefferson eagerly, "and did you have any
+manifestation?"
+
+"Oh, yes," laughed the gouty sufferer grimly, "a very material one
+indeed.  By some accident the medium knocked down the screen just after
+we'd seen a spirit face floating _above_ it.  In the confusion some one
+struck a light, and there was our medium--standing on the chair without
+his coat, and wrapping some transparent India muslin about himself,
+which had been dipped in phosphorus I believe, so that it gave out a
+curious shimmering light in the dark.  You may suppose I never went in
+for materialistic _seances_ again."
+
+"Still," said Mrs Jefferson, "although you may have been tricked, it
+doesn't stand to reason that spiritualism _is_ trickery.  I've come from
+the very core and centre of it--so to speak.  I've been at more
+_seances_ than I could count, and I've seen tests applied that _prove_
+the manifestations are genuine.  Still there are heaps of professional
+mediums who are not to be depended on, I grant.  If you want to know the
+truth of spiritualism, you can always work it out for yourself.  That's
+quite possible, only it's a deal of trouble."
+
+"I don't believe in it," reiterated Mrs Masterman stubbornly.  "All
+mediums are cheats and humbugs."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson.  "If it comes to exceptions laying down the
+rule, where are we?  The other day a clergyman was taken before the
+courts for drunkenness, but I suppose you're not going to say all
+clergymen are drunkards.  A doctor poisoned a patient by mistake, but
+surely we're not to class our dear medical men as poisoners and
+murderers on that account.  It's just the same with any abnormal or
+extraordinary facts that set up a new theory for investigation.
+Impostors are sure to creep in, and the lazy and the indifferent and the
+sceptical call their exposure `results.'  Depend on it we don't half
+investigate subjects now-a-days, and we suffer for it by giving place
+and opportunity for the development of a certain class of beings who
+prey on our credulity, and make profit out of our indolence and
+superstition."
+
+"There's something in spiritualism, you bet," drawled the nasal voice of
+Mr Ray Jefferson.  "I've had messages written to me, and things said
+that no third person could possibly have known about."
+
+"Ah, slate writing," sneered Mrs Masterman.  "I've seen that too.  Just
+another trick."
+
+"How do you explain that?" asked Mrs Jefferson quickly.
+
+"Well, this way.  I went to two or three different mediums so as to test
+them all.  I found they had no objections to bringing your own slates
+and writing your own questions, but while they held the slate under the
+table they kept you talking to distract your attention, and from time to
+time they got convulsive jerks and movements by which it was quite
+possible for them to see what was written.  Then you heard a scratching
+(the medium probably had a little bit of pencil in his finger-nail), and
+your answer was given you.  Well, let that pass for what it's worth, but
+I always noticed the medium asked if I wouldn't like a message, and when
+I said `yes,' he brought out _his own slate_."
+
+"But," said Mrs Jefferson, "didn't he let you examine it first?"
+
+"Oh yes, and wiped it over with a damp cloth.  Then it was held under
+the table, and in a few seconds covered with `spirit-writing.'  But I
+found out afterwards that you can buy slates with a _false cover_, this
+cover fits within the frame and is exactly like the other side of the
+slate, but, _your spirit-message is already written_, a touch makes the
+cover drop off, the medium covers it with his foot in case you should
+look under the table, out comes the slate, and there you are!"
+
+"On," said Mrs Jefferson angrily, "it's plain you've only been to the
+charlatans and impostors of spiritualism.  Why, I've had a message
+written in a _locked_ slate while I held the key and held the slate too.
+What do you say to that?"
+
+"I've only your word for it," said Mrs Masterman sarcastically.  "My
+slates were never locked."
+
+"And I've only _your_ word for what you've told us," answered Mrs
+Jefferson with rising wrath.  "I suppose my evidence may be as
+trustworthy."
+
+"Well," interposed another voice, "my view of spiritualism is, that it's
+an intensely humiliating idea after you've done with this world to be at
+the beck and call of any other human being who can make you go through a
+variety of tricks, as if you were a performing dog, in order to convince
+people still in the body that there is another life.  If that other life
+permits us to come back here and play tambourines, and knock furniture
+about, and write silly and ambiguous messages on slates, I don't--
+myself--think it's a very desirable one."
+
+This view of the question produced a blank silence.  It proceeded from a
+gentleman who was supposed to be a little "odd"--partly because he spoke
+seldom, and then with a startling originality, on any subject of
+discussion.
+
+Mr and Mrs Ray Jefferson looked at one another, somewhat dismayed.
+Mrs Masterman smiled triumphantly, the young poet murmured something
+vague about the inestimable beauty of sublime "mysteries," but the
+subject was temporarily extinguished.  The only side hitherto considered
+had been the `phenomenal,' and people--once the idea was originated--
+felt really inclined to think that after all, when they quitted the
+earth plane, it would not be a very elevating prospect to find
+themselves dragged back to give _seances_ and perform tricks like a
+French poodle in order to convince their friends and relatives that they
+were _still in existence_!
+
+The conversation only went on in subdued murmurs, and presently there
+was a feminine move towards the drawing-room.
+
+Once there the great subject as to whether Madame Zairoff would or would
+not appear that evening, was again freely discussed.  That it was an
+equally interesting probability to the sterner sex was soon made evident
+by the unusual alacrity with which they joined the circle.  They broke
+up into groups and knots, scattered through the length of the handsome,
+brilliantly lighted room, but a curious restlessness was apparent; no
+one settled down to cards or music.  Even the "odd" individual moved
+about and dropped cynical remarks along the route of his progress,
+instead of sitting down to backgammon as was his wont.  A few other
+misguided individuals, of the male sex, offered and accepted bets _sotto
+voce_ on the chances of the Unknown appearing.
+
+At last, when expectation had been strained almost to breaking point, it
+was set at rest.  The doors were thrown open, and, lightly leaning on
+Colonel Estcourt's arm, appeared Mrs Jefferson's much talked of, and
+beautiful "Mystery."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT.
+
+SURPRISE.
+
+An involuntary hush fell upon the whole assemblage.  Not a man or woman
+there but felt their breath come a little quicker, their hearts beat
+with suppressed excitement, as that perfect figure, with its magical
+indolent grace, swept slowly through the room and into their midst.
+
+It was the usual homage paid to Princess Zairoff, for she possessed that
+rare and delicate mixture of indifference, languor, and disdain that is
+in itself a distinction, and makes ordinary womanhood and beauty
+suddenly feel coarse and commonplace.
+
+She paused before Mrs Ray Jefferson, and greeted her with a soft
+indescribable grace, and after a few minutes' conversation permitted
+herself to be introduced to a few of the group around the little
+American.  That perfect ease of manner, which held not a vestige of
+condescension, soon exerted its charm.  One after another drew near that
+envied circle, anxious to pick up some stray pearl of speech from those
+lovely lips.  The women forgot to be envious, because she never for one
+moment forgot or ignored them.  Even gouty Mrs Masterman found that her
+ailment had been remembered, and was sympathetically enquired about in a
+way to which she was entirely unaccustomed.  The poet talked as if he
+drew in inspiration with every glance from those starry eyes, the
+musician at her request moved to the piano and played some of his "Music
+of the Future," and it no longer seemed incomprehensible.  A sense of
+exhilaration, of pleasure, of content, spread through the group, and
+animated discussion, and gave even ordinary conversation a sudden grace
+and charm.
+
+It was to be expected before the evening was over, that that
+conversation would ascend by natural gradations from the ordinary to the
+intellectual, yet no one could tell exactly how or when it began to do
+so, any more than they could describe the strange yet clear logic by
+which this one woman set to rights various perplexing problems, and gave
+the key as it were to a nobler and higher order of eclectic philosophy
+than they had yet ventured upon.
+
+To Mrs Ray Jefferson, that discussion in the Baths had acted as the
+stimulus of an olive to the palate.  She was all eagerness to resume it.
+
+"I hope, Madame Zairoff," she said, in her brisk, lively, fashion, "that
+you will give me a little enlightenment about what you said yesterday.
+This is just a leisure time with most of us, and I suppose mental
+culture is not incompatible with hygienic pursuits."
+
+"Assuredly not," said the Princess, smiling.  "The more you cultivate
+the mind the less you feel or care for the ailments of the body, and to
+give those ailments even occasional insignificance, is to first forget,
+and then banish them.  If you draw your mind away from the thought of
+pain, you cease to feel pain."
+
+"But that would require a far stronger mental capacity than we possess,"
+said Mrs Masterman.  Then she suddenly remembered that she had not felt
+a single gouty twinge the whole evening, because her mental
+consciousness had been unusually excited.  This remembrance made her
+grow suddenly thoughtful and attentive to the discussion.
+
+"I think," said Princess Zairoff, gently; "that we all make a great
+mistake in setting any absolute limit to our mental capacity.  It is
+quite within our own power to dwarf or extend it.  If we are content to
+rest satisfied with a small amount of knowledge we can do so, and even
+cease to suffer in our own self-esteem by feeling we are stupid, or
+indolent, or ignorant.  Our perceptions are gradually blunted, and
+society is kind enough to case most of its remarks and opinions in a
+sugar-coating, so that the real truth never reaches us.  We gradually
+find, then, that an opinion that soothes our personal vanity and
+self-esteem is a very pleasant opinion.  So long as we cherish that
+falsehood, so long do we blunt our faculties of progress.  Now it seems
+a very extraordinary thing to me, who have long been accustomed to
+investigate and direct the psychic side of nature, to find such numbers
+and numbers of people who don't believe in _any psychic laws at all_,
+far less care to investigate them as knowledge.  The reason is simply
+this, that they all are convinced that _one_ trivial, petty earth-life
+is the one life for which they were created and are responsible,
+therefore the only one they feel bound to investigate."
+
+She paused and looked at the circle of grave and wondering faces.
+
+"You have heard of the law of Karma, I suppose?" she said.
+
+There was a murmur, vague, spontaneous, or doubtful, according to the
+amount of comprehension excited by the question.
+
+"It is a pity," resumed the Princess, "that it is not more generally
+understood.  What is the difficulty?  I learnt it in my childhood just
+as your English children learn their catechism.  You have taken up the
+doctrine of Evolution very strongly, but Karma is its very leading law,
+so to speak.  Man is perpetually working out and developing afresh the
+energies, aspirations, and character with which his spirit was
+originally endowed.  He becomes, as it were, the product of the better
+part of himself, that struggles to the surface again and again during
+periods of incarceration in the flesh."
+
+"Then you would convey that we all live over and over again?"
+
+"Most certainly.  It is the only rational way to account for the
+injustice, the sorrows, and the miseries of earth.  It gives long
+opportunities for the modification of character; it acts as retribution
+to the evil and the vicious and the selfish; it gives a far deeper sense
+of responsibility than the shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a
+man's good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable
+consequences.  If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a
+bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief
+spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a
+Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life,
+you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side of his
+nature."
+
+A little shudder ran through the group at these bold words.  Mrs Ray
+Jefferson lifted her head and cast glances of triumph about, as one who
+should say, "I told you she would shock you all!"
+
+There was scarcely a man or woman there who did not attend church on
+Sundays, and who had not managed to make a comfortable compact between
+the tenets of religion and the demands of social and worldly pleasures.
+Not one who, if taken to task on the momentous subject of a spiritual
+future, could have given any rational explanation of why he or she held
+certain vague ideas on the subject of salvation, or put off the deeper
+consideration of the subject to some indefinite period when they would
+have had their fill of vanities, and lost either the means or the desire
+to pursue them.
+
+And yet there was a subtle _frou-frou_ of rustling skirts as the women
+drew slightly away, and a decided appearance of discomfort on the faces
+of the men, to whom an unpleasant truth was suddenly and sharply
+conveyed, and who found themselves strangely powerless to combat, or
+argue out its real meaning.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE.
+
+DISCUSSION.
+
+Colonel Estcourt came to the rescue.
+
+"No doubt," he said, "the subject and this view of the subject seems a
+little strange to our friends here.  We must remember they have not been
+accustomed to hear it freely discussed, as we have."
+
+"It _is_ strange," said Mrs Jefferson, rallying her energies, "but we
+should not shirk its consideration for that reason.  I quite agree with
+Madame Zairoff that people don't think half seriously enough of their
+real natures, the mysterious inner _something_ which we all feel we
+possess, but whose voice we stifle in the din of the world.  And yet,"
+she added, sighing pathetically as she looked at the great Worth's
+`creation,'--"the vanities are very pleasant.  Why should we turn
+anchorites?"
+
+"There is not the slightest necessity to do that," said the princess,
+smiling at the unuttered thought she had read in that glance.  "Far from
+it.  The gravest duties of life are generally those that meet us in the
+world, and are called forth by our actions in that world.  All lives are
+not meant to be isolated, and certainly none for the whole period of
+earth life.  A person would have to be very sure that he was _free_ to
+cut himself adrift from his fellows before he would even be permitted to
+do it."
+
+"Permitted!" echoed Mrs Jefferson, rather vaguely.  "But by whom?"
+
+"The teachers of occult science," answered the Princess Zairoff.
+
+"But who are they?" exclaimed the little American.
+
+"That I cannot tell you," she answered, gravely.  "They exist, and their
+influence is already beginning to make itself felt.  But it would be a
+poor triumph to unveil the highest wisdom that humanity can ever learn,
+in order to satisfy the idle and the curious, and the lovers of marvels.
+Those who desire to learn can always do so, but nothing is forced upon
+you, or even obtruded.  I should not have opened my lips on the subject
+had you not expressed a desire to hear something about it."
+
+"I suppose," said Mrs Jefferson, eagerly, "you yourself are a believer
+in occultism?"
+
+"Madame Zairoff is a great deal more than that," said Colonel Estcourt;
+"she is one of its most earnest students and most ardent votaries.  If
+you knew half of her marvellous powers you would congratulate yourselves
+upon being permitted to receive her, unless, indeed," he added, with a
+questioning glance at the beautiful woman beside him, "she has a fancy
+to make converts."
+
+The men became eager of entreaties to her so made, but the women held
+back a little.
+
+Princess Zairoff, however, assured them she had no intention of
+proselytising.  "It is quite true I am deeply interested in this
+subject," she said, "but I should be sorry to bore you all with my
+views, or the reasons for my holding those views.  Psychic inquiry
+demands a great deal more than cursory study.  There are many mysteries
+of nature that men have looked upon as enigmas, until patience and
+research have solved them for them.  Then they marvel how they could
+have been blind so long!  Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have
+all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side.  It is only
+because they don't readily lend themselves to the comprehension of our
+material nature, that we try to scoff them into the limbo of absurdity
+and imposture."
+
+"Ah," said Mrs Jefferson.  "Talking of clairvoyance, _that_ I do
+believe in.  I knew a coloured woman in America--the way that woman
+would tell you things--it was enough to make your flesh creep!  She'd
+just go quietly off to sleep, and you might ask her anything you liked,
+and she'd tell you; and it was all as true as possible."
+
+The princess met Julian Estcourt's eyes, and smiled strangely.  Mrs
+Jefferson caught the glance.
+
+"Perhaps," she said, "you're a clairvoyant?"
+
+"I used to be," she said, gravely.  "Perhaps my faculties have grown
+blunted, for want of use.  They are far from being as keen as they were
+in India.  However," and she smiled at the circle of faces, "I wonder if
+any of you would believe me if I told you what you were talking about at
+dinner time.  First of all, you must remember, your conversation could
+not have been betrayed to me by my friend, as he was not there, and that
+my rooms are on the opposite wing to the dining saloon.  Well, you
+discussed different phases of spiritualism.  This lady," she indicated
+Mrs Masterman, "gave her experiences of imposture; you," looking at
+Mrs Jefferson, "combated those experiences by your own, and this
+gentleman."--she smiled at the cynical individual, who was hovering on
+the outskirts of the circle--"silenced you all by reducing your theories
+to strong commonsense facts.  Shall I quote his own words?  After the
+rate people have been running after spiritual phenomena, they are
+absolutely refreshing.  He said that it was an intensely humiliating
+idea to find oneself at the beck and call of any other human being when
+you imagined you had done with this life."
+
+"Good gracious!" almost screamed Mrs Jefferson, "but how on earth did
+you hear all this?  It's positively alarming."
+
+"Well," said the princess, still smiling at the pale and
+conscience-stricken faces, "you see I have a--faculty shall I call it?--
+that enables me to hear and see anything I am curious about, or
+interested in.  I don't believe I could even explain how I do it; but it
+seems easy and natural enough to myself.  I only paid you a brief visit
+to-night, more that I might have a little bit of proof to give you, that
+the powers I spoke of do exist, and are capable of being trained to
+almost any extent, if the motives for developing them are good.  Have I
+convinced you?"
+
+She rose as she spoke, and stood facing them in her beautiful indolent
+grace.  She was garbed in some white soft stuff, which floated round her
+like a cloud, the wide hanging sleeves were lined with faint shell-like
+pink, and fell away from her bare lovely arms to the hem of her floating
+draperies.  She looked like some goddess of mythology, rather than a
+living woman, and as Julian Estcourt gazed at her he felt a sudden
+thrill of awe.
+
+Could that more than mortal beauty ever really be his--his in the common
+prose of possession that can never be disassociated with marriage--the
+prose that is to the delicate subtle beauty of love, what the rough
+touch is to the wings of the butterfly, the bloom of the grape?
+
+For a moment the thought seemed like sacrilege.  He could have fallen at
+her feet in a sudden adoration of the divine beauty and purity of
+embodied womanhood.  "If ever she has lived before," he said in his
+heart, "it must have been as a vestal virgin, or a martyred saint.
+Where in the world is such another woman?"
+
+The voice of the cynical philosopher broke on his ear and disturbed his
+thoughts.  "Madame, it is my humble opinion that you could convince us
+of anything you desired.  Happy are those who have so charming a
+disciple to expound their doctrines, happier still the fortunate few to
+whom those doctrines are to be expounded by lips so lovely and a heart
+so wise."
+
+Ere the circle had quite recovered from its astonishment at hearing a
+speech so flattering uttered by their surly Diogenes, they had parted to
+make way for the beautiful stranger, and the last gleam of her snowy
+robes had floated through the doorway, as a cloud melts into the
+darkness of descending night.
+
+There was a sort of long-drawn breath, a feeling as of long tension
+suddenly set free, a turning as if by one accord to one another.  Then--
+well, then all the tongues leaped into action, and for the remainder of
+that evening, like Thackeray's folk "At the Springs," they talked, and
+they talked, _and they talked_.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN.
+
+PREMONITION.
+
+When the Princess Zairoff was in the privacy of her own boudoir, she
+turned to Colonel Estcourt in a sudden appeal:
+
+"Why did you make me go, Julian?" she said.  "I knew I should only shock
+them.  I can't ever put up with that languid ignorant curiosity."
+
+"I think it will do them good to be shocked," he said, with a smile.
+"Give them something to think of beside their ailments.  And I had a
+special reason," he went on with a deeper note of tenderness in his
+voice--"I do not wish you to shut yourself away as you have been doing.
+You will grow morbid and dissatisfied with life.  I want you to take a
+healthy interest in it once again."
+
+She had thrown herself on a low cushioned lounge before the bright wood
+fire.  He took a chair beside her.  She seemed to lapse into profound
+thought, and he watched her beautiful grave face with adoring eyes.
+
+"I wish," she said suddenly, "one could live a free, simple,
+uncriticised life.  Do you remember the old days among the wild hills?
+The cool grey dawns... the sharp sweet air... the long gallops over the
+rough roads by the rice fields... the strange temples... the songs of
+the snake-charmers?  Ah, we were happy then, Julian, happier than we
+ever realised."
+
+"May we not be still happier?" he said earnestly.  "Life has a graver
+and a wider meaning, it is true, but that should only give us a deeper
+power of appreciation."
+
+A strange smile touched her lips; a smile of mystery, and of dreamy,
+unfathomable regret.
+
+"We shall never be happier," she said, "than we were then.  I have
+always felt that... yes, I know what you would ask.  Did I love you
+then?  Yes, Julian, with all my heart and soul... and yet--and yet--I
+could have been nothing more to you than a sister, a friend.  There was
+a purpose in my marriage."
+
+She ceased speaking.  For a moment her eyes closed, her head sank back
+wearily on the soft cushions.
+
+Presently she opened them, and met his anxious gaze.  "No, I did not
+faint," she said.  "But, why I know not, that sense of blankness and
+dizziness always comes over me when I speak on that subject.  There is
+something I wish, yet dread, to remember--but, just as I am on the point
+of grasping it, there is a blank."
+
+"Do not speak of that time," he said passionately.  "I hate to think you
+were the wife of that man--it was sacrilege... you--my pure-souled
+goddess."
+
+"He was a bad man," she said.  "But, up to a certain point, I could
+always escape and defy him.  He was a coward at heart, and he was afraid
+of me."
+
+Then suddenly she stretched out her arm and touched his shoulder with a
+timid, caressing movement.  "You need not be jealous of those years, my
+beloved," she said softly.  "No man would, who knew them and valued them
+for what they were to me."
+
+He sank on his knees, and folded his arms about her.  "Ah, queen of
+mine," he said, "it is only natural that I should be jealous of the
+lightest touch, or look, or word, that were once another's privilege.
+Therein lies the only sting in my happiness--"
+
+"Does not that prove it is of earth--earthly?" she said, as her deep
+mournful eyes looked back to his own.  "I believe, Julian, it would be
+better, even now, if we were to part.  I have always that dread upon my
+soul, that I am destined to bring you suffering--misfortune--"
+
+"Bring me what you will," he interrupted passionately, "but do not speak
+of parting!  Rather suffering and trial at your hands, oh, my life's
+love, than the greatest peace and prosperity from any other woman's!"
+
+"I wish you loved me less," she said sadly.  "But I am not forbidden to
+accept your love now; only, I have warned you, do not forget.  And
+now--" she added suddenly: "Put me to sleep... it is so long, so long,
+since I have known real rest, such as you used to give me."
+
+He rose slowly and stood beside her, as she nestled back amidst her
+cushions.  A strange calm and chill seemed to fold him in its peace, and
+the throbbing fires of pain and longing died slowly out of vein and
+pulse.  He laid one hand gently on the beautiful white brow; his eyes
+met hers, and the glance seemed like a command.  The lids drooped, the
+long, soft lashes fell like a fringe on the delicate, flushed cheek.
+One long, sobbing breath left her lips; then a beautiful serenity and
+calm seemed to enfold her.  Like a statue, she lay there, motionless,
+stirless; lifeless, one would have thought, save for the faint regular
+breath that stole forth from the parted lips.
+
+Julian Estcourt stood for a moment in perfect silence by her side.  Then
+he moved away, and, drawing aside the _portieres_ which separated the
+boudoir from the adjoining room, he called softly to her maid.
+"Felicie," he said, "your mistress will sleep for two hours; see that
+she is not disturbed."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Once out in the cool night-air, Julian Estcourt gave the rein to thought
+and memory.  The march of events had been rapid.  It seemed difficult to
+realise that he really stood in the light of an accepted lover to the
+woman who, but the previous day, he deemed at the other end of the
+world... difficult to realise that she loved him--and had loved him
+through all the blank, desolate years of absence and suffering they had
+both endured.
+
+Her warning came ever and again like a living voice across the fevered
+train of his thoughts.  But he was no whit more inclined to listen to it
+here, in the calmness and soberness of solitude, than when her own lips
+had spoken it, and the charm of her own presence had swept away prudence
+and self-restraint.
+
+"It may not be wise," he said in his heart, "but I have not the strength
+to deny myself the only happiness I have ever pictured as possible.  It
+is not as if I had frittered away my life on other women--on mere
+sensual pleasures.  From my boyhood up to the present hour her power has
+been the same--her charm for me the same, I love her.  That says all,
+and yet not half enough.  Human nature is weak.  I had dreamt of another
+life--of a higher and nobler field of duty, apart from the selfish joys
+that are inseparable from mere human ties--but I can yield that dream up
+without a regret.  I can turn back from the threshold I have crossed...
+May there not be a purpose in our meeting like this--in the prospect of
+our union?  If the time has come to teach, and to speak out boldly what
+has long been veiled in mysticism and doubt, where could a teacher so
+eloquent be found, or one whose natural gifts and loveliness could make
+those teachings of so much weight? and I--I, too, can help and protect
+her.  Our souls need not descend from the spiritual level they have
+attained--they may meet and touch, and yet expand in the duality of
+perfect love and perfect comprehension.  It is a glorious thought," and
+he lifted his eyes to the starry heights, that to him held all the
+mystery of peopled worlds--and were no mere pin-pricks of light, created
+to illuminate _one_.  "A beautiful thought--God grant it may be
+realised!"
+
+But even as his eyes rested on the solemn splendour of the heavens--even
+as the human passions of the senses grew stilled beneath the loftier
+aspirations of the soul--even as that involuntary prayer sprang from
+heart to lips, some inner consciousness whispered like a warning
+voice--"_it cannot be_."
+
+He started as if that sound were audible.  A cold and sudden terror
+swept over his body like a chilling wind.  "Bah," he cried.  "What a
+nervous fool I am!  Is this all my love has done for me--made me like a
+frightened child, starting at shadows?"
+
+He turned abruptly, and went within to seek his own room.
+
+It was just midnight.  Lights were being extinguished in the public
+rooms and corridors--silence and sleep were settling down upon the vast
+building.
+
+Colonel Estcourt exchanged his evening clothes for the comfort of
+dressing-gown and slippers, and then threw himself into an easy chair
+before the fire which was blazing brightly and cheerfully in the grate.
+
+It was the conventional hotel bedroom.  A dressing-table stood in the
+window; the bed, curtained and draped, looked inviting in its corner.  A
+lamp stood on a small table littered with books and papers; an array of
+pipes and cigar-holders were strewn carelessly on the marble
+mantelpiece.  A sense of brightness and commonplace comfort permeated
+the atmosphere, and were sensibly soothing after the chill of the cool
+December night.
+
+He took a cigar from his case and lit it, and threw himself back and
+smoked at his ease.
+
+As he did so, he heard a clock in the distance strike the quarter after
+midnight; mechanically he counted the strokes.  "She will wake now," he
+said, half aloud.  The sound of his voice startled himself in the
+stillness of the room.  As its echoes died away he glanced nervously
+round.  Then his face paled to the hues of death, his eyes dilated.
+Midway in the room a veiled misty figure seemed to float--transparent
+and yet distinct--and he saw its arm stretched out towards himself with
+a sudden impressive gesture.
+
+He tossed the cigar into the grate, then bent his head as if in
+submission.
+
+"Is it the summons--at last?" he said, faintly.
+
+If answer there was, it was audible only to himself.  To anyone looking
+on, it only seemed as if a sudden dreamy lassitude had overtaken him;
+his head sank back against the chair, his eyes closed, his face grew
+calm and peaceful, and, like a tired child, he fell asleep.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN.
+
+THE DREAM.
+
+As Julian Estcourt's eyes closed, it seemed to him that with a sudden
+sharp spasm of pain he tore himself away from that sleeping sentient
+portion of humanity which was his representation, and then, without
+effort or consciousness of his own, he seemed floating swiftly along
+over a dark and misty space.  A great sea tossed and moaned beneath him.
+He felt that someone was beside him, but he had no desire to question
+its personality.  Now and then lights flashed through the dusky shadows
+which enveloped him, and as they flashed he saw vivid pictures of plains
+and cities and mountains.
+
+Over one such city, bathed in the clear lucid flame of the full moon, he
+seemed to pause.  He saw bridges, piles of buildings, dark flowing
+canals, a strange medley of streets, some broad and beautiful, others
+dark, narrow and pestilential, reeking with the fumes of dram-shops.
+
+There was snow on the ground, sleighs were gliding swiftly to and fro.
+People spoke but seldom; an air of restraint, of fear, of rebellion
+impressed him, as the furtive glances and brief whispers became pregnant
+with meaning.
+
+Gradually, as he moved through the hurrying crowd, he was conscious of a
+name constantly on their lips.  It was muttered by the voices of tipsy
+men reeling from their vile dens of intoxication, by the lips of painted
+women as they drew their furs around their tawdry finery, by the
+artisans with their pinched faces and hungry eyes, by all the classes to
+whom life is a bitter struggle with poverty and necessity.
+
+To and fro he seemed to move, without haste, and yet with the rapidity
+of thought.  In the magnificence of gilded saloons, in the snow-covered
+street, in the haunts of poverty and vice, always and always that one
+word was tossed to and fro in every accent of hate and opprobrium.  And
+when in wonder he turned to the shape floating still beside him, and
+would have questioned the meaning of that word, it stayed the question
+on his lips with a mute gesture of silence.
+
+Then, strange to say, he seemed to gather into his own consciousness a
+sense of deep implacable hatred.  A hatred that thrilled the air as with
+poisoned breath, and beat in the pulses of living men to whom existence
+was brutalised by tyranny and vice.  The sense of this awful murderous
+Hate, at last grew terrible as a burden, so fully and consciously did he
+recognise it, so clearly did he see of what it was capable, and so
+mysteriously did it seem to breathe about the very air through which he
+moved.
+
+It filled the pulses of the night with a horror from which he shrank
+aghast, it stretched a blood-red hand over the white drifts of unsullied
+snow, it painted out the brilliant hues of luxury, and threw yet darker
+shadows over the sad homes of want and misery and crime.
+
+And more and more he strained every nerve to catch the meaning of that
+word which was its embodiment, and again and again he failed.
+
+Suddenly the scene changed.  He was in a poor chamber, barely and
+miserably furnished.  It lay in the centre of a pile of buildings facing
+a half-frozen canal.  It seemed to him that the building consisted of
+hosts of small tenements, all swarming with human life, but he had
+passed up the common stairway seemingly unnoticed, and entered this
+special room.
+
+It was tenanted by two people.  An old woman of some three-score years,
+with a thin worn face and grey hair banded over her hollow temples.  She
+was thinly clad, and had an old tippet of yellow fur over her shoulders.
+She sat near the stove.  Before her stood a young man in the dress of a
+Petersburg student.  They were talking low and earnestly.  Again that
+word reached him, again the full sense of its meaning eluded his grasp.
+
+Suddenly the comprehension of the scene became clear to him.  He saw
+they were mother and son, that he was relating some incident to her with
+a suppressed enthusiasm that yet made itself audible in his deep,
+thrilling tone, and visible in the glow and sparkle of his eye.
+
+"She is an angel," he said at last.  "We do well to trust her--but what
+a risk, think of it, mother--five hundred lives, and only a few hours to
+decide their fate."
+
+The woman's face grew white, her feeble limbs shivered as with an ague
+fit.  "My son," she moaned, "my only one--and you, too, may be
+sacrificed.  Oh, unhappy country, unhappy fate that makes it ours!  But
+you are right.  The Princess is an angel of goodness; she will save us.
+She has said it."
+
+They both turned involuntarily towards a small image, before which a
+lamp burned.  He saw them kneel hand in hand before it; then the room
+faded into darkness--he was in another place now.
+
+A sense of luxury, of perfume, of dreamy warmth, and then he saw,
+opening before him in a vista of exquisite colour, a suite of softly
+lighted chambers.  They seemed to glow like jewels, each perfect in the
+richness and loveliness of its setting, and at the farthest end of one
+of them a woman reclined on a couch of white furs.  She was wrapped in a
+loose gown of thick white silk, bordered also with snowy fur, and her
+lovely hair was unbound, and fell in a long trail of dusky splendour
+over the colourless purity of her surroundings.
+
+Her eyes were wide open, and full of a fear that was almost horror, and,
+as if to account for it, he seemed suddenly to hear, coming through the
+fragrant stillness of those virginal chambers, the dull heavy step of a
+man.  She raised herself on one lovely bare arm, her hand went to her
+heart, then slowly her eyes were upraised as if in some dumb prayer for
+strength.  A strange frozen calm came over the perfect features.  The
+face looked as if carved in marble.
+
+Nearer and nearer came the heavy step, reeling and uncertain now, yet
+stumbling with drunken obstinacy towards some goal to which the leaden
+senses pointed their brutal desires.
+
+Up to this time, Julian Estcourt had only been conscious of a passive
+blind submission to the force controlling him; but now power seemed to
+thrill him, desire seemed struggling to life, the will awakened from its
+lethargy, and a god-like strength and force seemed to spring into life,
+held in check but for a moment, as the increased vigilance of sense bade
+him watch yet a little longer.
+
+With breath reeking of drink, with bloodshot eyes and reeling step, the
+satyr entered.  Yet so great was the spell and charm of that womanly
+purity and dauntless pride, that even lust and tyranny sank abashed on
+the threshold, and a certain shame and hesitancy were visible in the
+flushed face and bloodshot eyes.
+
+"Why are you here?" asked the woman calmly.  "Have you mistaken your
+way?"
+
+"No,"--and the intruder advanced with sudden boldness.  "I have come to
+ask if you are still of the same mind--still intent on destroying your
+_friends_."  His laugh rang out mockingly.  "Fine friends truly for a
+Princess Zairoff.  I gave you till to-night--come, which is to be
+sacrificed--your womanly scruples, or the five hundred lives you have
+fooled into security?"
+
+Then she sprang to her feet, a statue no longer, but a living,
+passionate woman.
+
+"I have borne enough," she cried.  "Beware how you tempt the power that
+has been strong enough to keep me from you all these years.  Beware,
+too, how, once again, you stain your soul with innocent blood.
+Thousands of voices are crying against you even now.  Thousands of years
+of suffering on your part will not avail to buy you peace in the future.
+I have prayed for these unfortunates, I have begged their lives at your
+hands on my very knees.  Do not tempt me too far.  I say again--you do
+not know what it is you do."
+
+He laughed brutally.  "I know," he said, "that you shall pay for their
+lives, or sacrifice them.  I have waited long enough.  I am sick of
+hearing men rave about your beauty, and feeling that that beauty is no
+more to me than if I were a beggar at my own gates."
+
+"Do you forget," she said solemnly, "the compact we made?  I am not at
+any man's choice, or disposal.  My life has a mission to accomplish, and
+you, with all your brutal desires and evil passions, cannot turn that
+life from its destined purpose.  Do not forget the warnings you have
+already received."
+
+So beautiful she looked, standing there in her floating, snowy
+draperies, with her solemn, mysterious eyes fixed upon that sullen,
+lowering face.  Beautiful and mysterious as some vestal priestess
+defending the secrets of her Order.  But that beauty, for once, seemed
+less to subjugate than to inflame the evil desires of that lower nature
+to which it was bound.
+
+"I will listen no more to vague threats," he said fiercely.  "I have
+paid a heavy enough price for you.  I mean to enjoy my purchase.  See,
+here is the list--they are fairly trapped--a word from you and they are
+safe--these impatient fools.  Keep silence--and the knout, the mines,
+the slow torturing death of Siberia, awaits them all.  Now, once again--
+your answer?"
+
+He drew nearer--his eyes aflame--his arms outstretched.
+
+Then a change, wild and fearful, as that of the tropical tornado to a
+southern landscape, swept over that lovely form.
+
+Her eyes flashed, her figure seemed to dilate.  Slowly she raised her
+arm and stretched it towards that brutal ravisher...
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Struggling, panting, tearing, as it were, against a power that bade him
+hearken to that terrible answer, Julian Estcourt cried or seemed to cry
+aloud in an agony of entreaty.
+
+Then a rushing noise as of an unloosed torrent was in his ears; a dull,
+confused pain beat like clanging hammers in his brain.
+
+His eyes opened and he found himself, bathed in the cold sweat of more
+than mortal terror, lying face downwards on the floor of his own
+bedroom.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+In a blind, dazed fashion he struggled to his feet and rushed to the
+window and let the cool night air blow over his face.  Every limb was
+trembling; he could not think with any clearness.
+
+In some dim, unconscious fashion he groped for his watch, found it, and
+looked at the time.  A quarter-past one.  Only an hour had passed--an
+hour--and he felt as if centuries had swept over his head in the vivid
+horrors of that awful dream.
+
+"But it was only a dream," he cried aloud, drawing in deep panting
+breaths of the pine-scented air.  "Oh! thank God.  Thank God, it was
+only a dream!"
+
+And he sank on his knees and sobbed like a child in the star-lit
+solitude of the night.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE.
+
+EFFECTS.
+
+The next day, when Colonel Estcourt sent to know if the Princess Zairoff
+would receive him, he was informed she was ill, and could see no one.
+
+Feeling strangely disinclined for mere ordinary society, he ordered his
+horse to be brought round and spent the greater portion of the day in
+long, fierce gallops over the miles of stretching sand that framed in
+the bay.
+
+The sky was chill and grey; a cold wind blew from the sea and dashed the
+salt foam in his face as the waves swept stormily in.  But the dull sky
+and the stormy sea suited his mood, and seemed to string up the relaxed
+tension of his nerves.
+
+"Nature is man's best physician after all," he said to himself, reining
+in his beautiful Arab at last, and baring his brow to the fresh breeze.
+"Even as she is his best friend.  Only we don't believe it.  We live in
+the world and follow the ways of the world, until our faculties are
+blunted, our natures demoralised, our tastes vitiated, our energies
+enfeebled.  How many lands I have travelled over, how many cities I have
+seen, and yet I verily believe that the wild Sioux in his prairies, and
+the wandering Bedouin of the desert, have more of real manhood than we.
+Yes; and get more real enjoyment out of life."
+
+It was quite dusk before he reached the hotel.  The country was all new
+and strange to him, and he had missed his way more than once.  But
+though he was tired, and stiff, and hungry, he felt that his mental
+energies were braced, his mind at ease, and the disturbing and torturing
+memories of the previous night no longer tormented him.
+
+At dinner he sat next to Mrs Ray Jefferson, who was radiant and voluble
+as ever.
+
+She had a great deal to say about the Princess, who, it appeared, had
+again spent the morning in the Baths.
+
+"She looked ill," said the little American.  "Awfully white and languid.
+I asked her if she had seen a ghost.  There was something scared and
+strange about her.  I surmise it's nerves.  It was odd, too," and she
+lowered her voice as if taking the Colonel into a special confidence.
+"But she went off to sleep in the hot room.  Nothing could waken her.  I
+got rather frightened."
+
+His face looked disturbed.  "To sleep?" he said.  "That is rather
+unusual, is it not?"
+
+"Oh, plenty of us go to sleep in the cooling-room," said Mrs Jefferson,
+"but I never saw anyone do it in any of the others.  She was talking to
+me, and then quite suddenly she said `I feel sleepy.  Please do not
+speak.  I shall wake in a quarter of an hour.'  And so she did."
+
+"You did not try to waken her, I suppose?" asked Colonel Estcourt
+anxiously.
+
+"Well, I did, but it was no use, so I let her be.  I saw she was all
+right, because she breathed naturally, and her heart beat quite
+regularly.  Still, it seemed odd.  I asked her maid afterwards about it.
+She's a pretty little Frenchwoman, and always waits in the cooling-room
+for her mistress.  But she didn't seem to think anything of it.  She
+said she very often does that, and it is best not to try and waken her.
+I must say she seemed much better afterwards.  Brighter and more alert.
+What a lovely creature she is!" she added enthusiastically.  "I suppose
+you know you're the most envied person in the hotel at this present
+moment?"
+
+He smiled, but his face still looked anxious and disturbed.
+
+"Because I have the privilege of being her friend?" he said.  "Well, I
+am not going to deny that it _is_ a privilege--a most enviable one."
+
+"I should think," said Mrs Jefferson meaningly, "it is also one that
+has its dangers."
+
+The calm grey eyes met her sharp inquisitive glance, but were utterly
+unrevealing.
+
+"I will not affect to misunderstand you," he said, "but there are men
+who covet danger for its own sake.  They may seem foolhardy, but they
+are only accountable to themselves for the risks they run."
+
+"Well," said Mrs Jefferson warmly, "I'm only a woman, and yet if it's
+possible to fall in love with one of my own sex, I've done it.  She's
+perfectly charmed me.  I can't get her out of my head for a single
+moment.  It's not only her wonderful beauty, but her mind.  As for our
+poet," she added, laughing, "he's quite gone.  He's done nothing all day
+but moon about under the pine trees.  Writing sonnets, I guess, and
+hoping to catch a glimpse of her.  All useless--she's not left the hotel
+to-day, and I suppose she'll not favour us to night."
+
+Colonel Estcourt was silent.  Conversation was more or less general, but
+it sounded vague and unmeaning to him.  He heard a voice on his left
+holding forth with energy, but he did not heed it until Mrs Jefferson
+touched his arm and whispered an entreaty.
+
+"Do listen," she said, "it's Diogenes.  Isn't he coming out?  I surmise
+it's _her_ influence.  You remember last night?"
+
+"An atheist," said the dogmatic voice of the individual who had given
+that common-sense view of spiritualism the previous evening, "must be a
+fool of the most complete type.  Because he doubts what _men_ teach of
+God, is no reason for doubting the existence of God.  I grant that the
+Reverend John Smith, with his high-falutin' trappings of Ritualism on
+one side, and the Reverend Josiah Stiggins, with his coarse and
+commonplace familiarity with the Almighty (whose personality he has the
+effrontery to expound as if he were discussing the characteristics of an
+ordinary mortal), on the other, are enough to drive hundreds of people
+out of the pale of Christianity, and force them to take refuge in
+defiance and opposition.  But, all the same, the expectation of another
+life is a rooted belief in the minds of all men, quite apart from
+religion.  Even the savage has it.  If we call it human nature to eat,
+drink, fight, love, or desire, it must also be human nature that gives
+universal assent to this idea of an after existence.  The fact of
+finding it in all races is but a proof that Man is the creation of a
+Power that intends him for a far wider range of existence than he sees
+before him.  There are many things affirmed by man's consciousness that
+he cannot really or logically explain.  Yet it is a narrow reasoning
+that bids us reject the inexplicable."
+
+"Yet you reject spiritualism," said Mrs Jefferson quickly.
+
+"Not at all, my dear madam.  I only reject the humiliating and degrading
+trickery that is its sensational form.  I only repeat what I said
+yesterday, that no lofty or educated mind could do anything but resent
+the idea of being subjugated to a mere material will, and being forced
+by that will to perform conjuring tricks in order that a small portion
+of the civilised world should gape, and gaze, and cry out `How
+wonderful!'  To deny that spirits exist, aye and work, would be to deny
+the very crudest faith in Christianity."
+
+"There is no doubt," said Colonel Estcourt, "that everything _is_
+explicable, but we must wait for the growth and development of our
+higher natures before we can comprehend half the mysteries of the higher
+life.  The great fault of the materialist and the scientist is, that
+they would fain bring everything down to the level of their _present_
+comprehension, instead of patiently waiting the completion of their
+future spiritual forces.  It is quite evident that we are not meant to
+attain our full mental stature on the earth-plane, or what would be left
+to achieve in the countless ages of immortality?  Man believes in
+immortality and yet seems to contemplate it as a state of stagnation and
+quiescence.  Why he believes in it he cannot fully explain.  It is, as
+you said before, a consciousness given to the races of humanity, but no
+more capable of commonplace analysis than time, or space, or thought."
+
+"The beautiful is as the cloud that floats in radiant space," murmured
+the poet.  "The very vagueness of form permits the eye to clothe it in
+the loveliest tints of Fancy."
+
+"Now that's what I call rational," murmured Mrs Jefferson in Colonel
+Estcourt's ear.  "Do you think he knows what he means.  I guess he
+don't...  Gracious!"
+
+She started, and suddenly grasped his arm.  "Look," she said, "there's
+the princess in the doorway.  Is she coming in?  No!  She's moving away.
+I believe she's going into the drawing-room after all.  Did you see
+her?"
+
+"No," said Colonel Estcourt.  "Are you sure it was the princess?"
+
+His face looked strangely pale.  She saw that his hand trembled as he
+laid down his knife on the plate before him.
+
+"Sure?" exclaimed Mrs Jefferson, with asperity.  "Of course I'm sure!
+It's not easy to mistake _her_, I fancy.  I can't think why you didn't
+catch sight of her.  She just looked in as she passed, I suppose."
+
+"No doubt," he said.  But the gravity and uneasiness of his face
+deepened.
+
+Just then one of the waiters paused beside Mrs Jefferson's chair.  She
+turned eagerly to him.  "Watson," she said, "just oblige me by going to
+the drawing-room and finding out if Madame Zairoff is there.  I guess,"
+she added laughingly to Colonel Estcourt, "that I'm not going to waste
+my time over thirteen courses if she is."
+
+Still he did not speak, and his unusual pallor and gravity began to
+affect the lively little American woman.  She helped herself to truffled
+pheasant, and became absorbed in gastronomical duties.
+
+Two or three minutes passed, when the man who had gone on her errand
+returned.  She glanced eagerly up.
+
+"Madame Zairoff is not in the drawing-room," he said in a low voice.  "I
+met her maid on the stair-case, and she says that madame is not well
+enough to leave her apartments this evening."
+
+"But, good gracious me," began Mrs Jefferson, with angry impatience.
+"I saw--"
+
+"Hush," said Colonel Estcourt in a low, impressive voice.  "Oblige me by
+saying nothing about it.  Remember, I too was looking in the same
+direction, yet I saw--nothing."
+
+Mrs Jefferson dropped her knife and fork and stared at him.
+
+"Now, Colonel," she said, "am I in my senses, or am I not?  I've only
+had iced water to drink.  I believe I'm a commonplace person eating a
+commonplace, though very excellent, dinner.  Nothing's been playing
+tricks with my nerves I can swear, and I do assure you that the Princess
+Zairoff stood there in that doorway and looked in here, not five minutes
+ago.  Why, I'll even tell you the gown she had on.  It was thick white
+silk and had a border of soft-looking white fur.  There!" she added
+triumphantly.  "You may go up to her rooms after dinner, and if she
+hasn't got that gown on, and if she didn't come by that doorway--well--
+I'll say I've gone stark staring mad!  That's so!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
+
+A PROMISE.
+
+Just as the ladies had left the dining-room, a note was put into Colonel
+Estcourt's hand.
+
+He opened it and read the two brief lines it contained.  "I will see you
+in my boudoir when you have finished dinner."
+
+He pushed aside the glass he had just filled and left the table at once.
+
+He knocked at the door of her room, and the low, sweet voice that bade
+him enter, thrilled his heart with its accustomed sorcery.  He opened
+the door, but as he stepped across the threshold, he suddenly paused,
+and for a moment it seemed to him that his heart ceased to beat.  Was it
+only chance that reproduced the dream-scene of the previous night, for
+the suite of rooms were thrown open, and through the delicate amber
+tints of the satin hangings gleamed the faint rose-hue of lamplight,
+paling into opal in the farthest chamber but giving to all the soft and
+glowing colouring he remembered so well.  Swiftly as his eyes took in
+the picture, they seemed also to take in the lovely figure reclining
+among soft snowy furs, robed in colourless silk bordered with the same
+fur.
+
+She raised herself on her arm as he approached.  "I have not treated you
+well to-day, Julian," she said.  "But I have been ill--nervous--
+disturbed.  I slept badly, and had terrible dreams.  You must forgive
+me."
+
+He bent over the extended hand and touched it with his lips.
+
+"You are cold," she said.  "What is the matter?"
+
+"I too, had a terrible dream," he said.  "I suppose the effects are
+still upon me."  Then he looked calmly and fixedly at her.
+
+"You were downstairs a few moments ago," he said.  "Why?"
+
+She looked surprised.  "Did you see me?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.  "No," he said.  "It was your American friend."
+
+Her face grew thoughtful.  "Then the power _is_ coming back," she said.
+"I wonder why."
+
+He seated himself beside her.  "Of course," he said, "it was not really
+yourself?"
+
+"I have not left this couch for three hours," she said.  "All the same,
+I wanted to have a peep at you all."
+
+"I hope you will not exercise that power too frequently," he said.  "You
+know I never liked it."
+
+"I know," she said, smiling up at his grave face, "that you were always
+afraid I should not come back from my flights, but I always do.  _They_
+send me--very much against my will--still, I must obey."
+
+She sighed.  Then after a moment she put out her hand with a caressing
+little gesture.  "What was your terrible dream?" she said.  "I see it is
+troubling you still.  You are _distrait_ and absent.  Tell me."
+
+He touched the white hand with his lips.
+
+"I would rather not," he said, "because you were concerned in it, and it
+seemed as if you were trying to reveal something or show me something
+that I dreaded to see.  It was in fighting against seeing it that I
+awoke."
+
+She started from her reclining position and fixed her eyes on his face.
+"Julian," she cried, in a sudden breathless way, "was it--was it?--No."
+She broke off and wrung her hands helplessly.  "It has escaped me again.
+I _cannot_ remember.  Oh, that I could!  It tortures me so.  Julian--"
+and she looked at him appealingly.  "_You_ must help me--you must bring
+it back.  I will not wed you till that mystery is solved.  Something
+warns me against it."
+
+"My dearest," he said soothingly, "do not excite yourself in this
+fashion.  It can make no difference to me that there should be mystery
+or tragedy in your past life.  Have I not always loved you?  Have we not
+chosen the same path in life, only now we shall tread it side by side,
+not one far in advance of the other?  The infinite delight of that
+companionship shall not be marred by any memories of the past.  If I am
+content to let it rest, surely you may be."
+
+She drew herself away.  Her deep strange eyes looked coldly and yet
+mournfully back to his yearning gaze.
+
+"You were never a coward, Julian," she said.  "What is it you fear now?"
+
+He threw himself on his knees by her side and buried his face in the
+soft white furs.  She saw that he was trembling greatly.  "I cannot
+tell," he said hoarsely.  "Would to God that I could!  But if you should
+change, if you should repent--Oh! to lose your love now would kill me!"
+
+She laid her hand on his bowed head.  "Rest assured you shall not lose
+_that_," she said in her low thrilling voice.  "No, Julian, that is not
+the danger--it threatens me, not you.  There will be no change on my
+part, not so far as my love is concerned.  Will that assurance satisfy
+you?"
+
+"You need not ask that, beloved?  But why disturb our peace?  If I am
+content--"
+
+"There must be no secret between your soul and mine," she said solemnly.
+"For what, think you, is your power granted, but that I may answer to
+it, that I may lead you on the road--and that you, for me, may throw
+open the portals?"
+
+"In the future," he said eagerly, "I am content to do your will.  But
+not now--not to draw the veil from our buried miseries.  Let them be as
+dead things--out of sight and mind."
+
+"You know," she said, "that nothing dies--not a life, or an act, or a
+thought.  You may put the past out of sight, but it lives still--lives
+in its hidden crimes, its secret sins, its evil and its good--lives to
+haunt and shape our future, let that future dream as it will of
+forgetfulness."
+
+He rose from his knees, his face was still pale, but his eyes glowed
+like living fire.
+
+"When will you wed me, Estarah?" he asked, abruptly.
+
+The soft colour flushed her cheek.  Her eyes drooped.
+
+"My heart is yours," she said.  "My life lives but in the shadow of your
+own.  Why should I withhold--this poor gift?"
+
+She placed her hand in his, and let him draw her to his heart.  "I will
+wed you when you will," she said, "but only if you yield to my
+condition.  It is an easy one, Julian.  Why do you fear?"
+
+Ah--why?  He could not answer that question to his own heart, much less
+to hers.  He could not paint the shuddering horror which had forced him
+to veil his eyes and shrink aghast from that last scene in his Dream.
+
+Yet when he looked down on her in her pure womanly beauty, and felt the
+clinging tenderness of her arms, and knew that among all the world of
+men who had worshipped and wooed her, he alone had kept his place and
+awakened a response of tenderness, he felt his heart thrill and glow
+with sudden strength and pride.
+
+"It shall be as you wish," he said.  "On the night that heralds our
+bridal morn, I promise, if my power be still the same, that I will do
+your bidding."
+
+She lifted her face.  It was radiant with a strange mysterious joy.  "At
+last," she said, brokenly--"at last I shall know.  Every page of my life
+will be clear.  Heart to heart, soul to soul, so we shall stand, oh,
+beloved!  You and I, with senses purified, with no secret unshared, with
+spirits unfettered and souls at rest, so shall we greet our bridal morn.
+For this did I brave the ordeal, for this have I faced almost the
+bitterness of death--but the trial is almost over--the goal is almost
+reached.  Go, now, my life's beloved, lest indeed my heart should break
+beneath its weight of joy!  Go; but fear not.  I am yours for ever in
+the life we know, and in the deep Unknown beyond I shall claim you
+still!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
+
+THE DREAM INTERPRETED.
+
+For some days no one in the hotel saw the Princess Zairoff.  But her
+influence seemed to have left a distinct impression, judging from the
+run on Buddhist literature at the different circulating libraries of the
+town.  The "Occult World", "Isis Unveiled," and "Esoteric Buddhism" were
+in great demand; so were various works on Mesmerism, Clairvoyance, and
+Occult Science.
+
+The poet plunged into "Zanoni," which he had read in the days of his
+boyhood as one reads a fairy-tale, and he and Mrs Ray Jefferson, being
+the greatest enthusiasts, held long and learned and quite unintelligible
+discussions over these mysterious subjects, with a view to being able to
+hold their own with the beautiful proselytiser when she should deign to
+come amongst them all once more.
+
+The weather had changed, and kept the invalids indoors, so there was
+plenty of time for "serious reading," as Mrs Jefferson called it.
+
+They took to calling the Princess "the Eastern mystery," and were quite
+certain that she must be gifted with abnormal powers.  Mrs Jefferson
+related the story of her appearance in the doorway, her belief in it
+having long since been substantiated by Colonel Estcourt's reluctant
+admission that the Princess was certainly attired in a white silk gown,
+bordered and trimmed with white fur, when he went up to her rooms that
+evening.
+
+Mrs Masterman alone held out, and scoffed audibly at the mystic
+literature, and what she called the "insane jabber" that went on in the
+drawing-room every evening.
+
+"Psychic phenomena, indeed!" the worthy lady would snort.  "Don't talk
+to me about such rubbish!  It's just as bad as the mediums and the slate
+writers."
+
+"Dear madam," pleaded the gentle voice of the enamoured poet, "do not, I
+pray you, confound these great mysteries with the strain of Human Error
+running through their attempted explanation--an explanation only
+intended to bring them down to the level of our material understandings.
+Let me persuade you to read that most exquisite poem `The Light of
+Asia.'"
+
+"Light of your grandmother!" exclaimed Mrs Masterman with sublime
+contempt.
+
+"I fear," lamented the poet, "it never was granted to her.  She lived in
+a benighted age.  She had not our privileges."
+
+"And a very good thing too," said the purple-visaged dowager wrathfully.
+"Privileges indeed!  Fine privileges, if honest, sober-minded
+Christians are to learn the way to Heaven from heathens and idolaters.
+You are all just as bad as those people Saint Paul speaks of, who were
+always running after some new thing.  I'm happy to say my Bible and my
+Church are good enough for me.  I don't want a new religion at my time
+of life."
+
+"The teachers in the Church are so very frequently our intellectual
+inferiors," murmured the poet, "that they only excite commiseration, or
+amusement."
+
+"Well, I suppose they know their business," snapped Mrs Masterman, "I'm
+sure no man would go into the Church if he didn't feel a call, and the
+fact of his doing so and taking up that life should be enough to prevent
+any right-minded person from ridiculing mere human frailties of voice
+and manner and appearance."
+
+"Unfortunately," murmured the poet, "I have been at college with several
+embryo parsons.  But to the best of my recollection the only `special'
+call they had for the _office_ was the call of some earthly relative or
+friend who had a comfortable living at his disposal.  It seems to me--I
+may be wrong, of course--but it really does seem to me that we have
+quite reversed the old order of religious ministration.  At first every
+worldly consideration, even the necessaries of life, were given up by
+those who undertook the office.  Now, the office is only undertaken
+_for_ the worldly considerations, and the necessities of life--"
+
+"Oh," cried Mrs Masterman, losing her temper, which even at the best of
+times was exceedingly hard to keep.  "You go off, young man, to your
+`Lights of Asia,' and all your other idolatrous rubbish.  The truth is
+this foreign woman has bewitched you all, and will end in making you
+heathens like herself.  Thank goodness I've too much sense to listen to
+her.  It's my belief she'll turn out a murderess, or a fire worshipper,
+or something of that sort before we've seen the last of her.  I don't
+like mysterious persons!  If she hadn't had big eyes, and a straight
+nose, and a figure like those Venuses and creatures who hold the lamps
+in the corridors, no one here would have troubled their heads about
+her!"
+
+And she swept away contemptuously, leaving the poet utterly aghast at
+her last indignant speech.  He repeated it to Mrs Ray Jefferson, who
+was reclining in a rocking-chair, endeavouring to comprehend "The Light
+of Asia."  The endeavour, however, was not very successful, and she
+hailed the approach of the poet with delight.  His account of the
+conversation filled her with wrath and indignation.  The feelings might
+have been partially due to Mrs Masterman's remembered snubs on the
+matter of "feet," and "suppressed gout," at the Turkish Bath.  They
+certainly rose strongly to the occasion, and, with the help of sundry
+powerful Americanisms, gave a very fair display of vituperative
+eloquence.
+
+The poet was more and more convinced that there was only one perfect
+woman in the world, and that was the beautiful creature whom he had
+apostrophised in sonnets as:--
+
+  "Mysterious Mystery, whose bright sad eyes,
+  Wild as the roe, and deep with undreamt dreams."
+
+  Etcetera, etcetera.
+
+So he listened and sighed, and in a low and plaintive voice, significant
+of hidden woe and much "soul suffering," to quote from another effusion,
+he read to her fragments of the "Light of Asia," which she could not in
+the least comprehend, but which she bluntly criticised as "not half bad
+to listen to if you felt drowsy."
+
+"Oh, but I do wish the Princess would come down," she said at last in
+the intervals of a "selection."
+
+"I've such hundreds of questions to ask her.  Seems to me she dropped
+the seed in pretty fruitful soil the other night, for we're all just
+`gone' on occultism.  Only we don't know anything about it.  Ah, there's
+Colonel Estcourt, I'll ask him if it's possible to have her down this
+evening.  I don't mind which body she comes in: the Astral or the
+ordinary.  In fact, I think I should prefer the former.  Colonel!" she
+called out, raising her voice.  "Come here, I want to speak to you."
+
+She put her request to him as he obeyed her summons, and put it with an
+earnestness and fervour that showed it was sincere, and not the formula
+of idle curiosity.
+
+"I don't know," he said, "if it will be possible, but, if the princess
+consents, I will arrange that two or three of you shall have an
+opportunity of witnessing how really marvellous her powers are.  She
+never makes a display or show of them, for reasons which you cannot yet
+understand, but, if she consents, I should like you, Mrs Jefferson, and
+my young friend here (smiling at the poet's excited face), and one or
+two other people interested in the matter, to come up to her boudoir
+this evening.  I will just send up a note and ask."
+
+"I could just worship you, Colonel," cried the little American,
+ecstatically.  "It's real good of you to offer such a glorious treat to
+us."
+
+"Do not thank me yet," he said, smiling; "you do not know whether you
+will be received."
+
+At the same moment there came a sound in the air above their heads--
+soft, clear, vibrating--like the faint echo of a silver bell.
+
+Mrs Jefferson started, the poet turned pale.  Colonel Estcourt looked
+at them gravely.
+
+"It is the answer," he said.  "You may come.  She will receive us.  Who
+else do you wish to invite?"
+
+"Oh, my husband, if I may," cried Mrs Jefferson, eagerly, "and
+Diogenes--he's so solid and sensible.  His imagination never plays
+tricks with him."
+
+"Very well," said Colonel Estcourt, "bring them also."
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+The Princess Zairoff was seated in her boudoir reading, as the party
+filed in, headed by Colonel Estcourt.
+
+She rose and greeted them with the same sweet and gracious manner that
+had so charmed Mrs Jefferson.
+
+"I know why you are here," she said, as the little American burst into
+vivacious explanations.  "I am quite ready to do anything Julian wishes.
+You know--or, perhaps, you do not know--that he trained my
+_clairvoyante_ faculties long ago.  They are natural to me, I suppose;
+but you do not require to be told that even natural gifts are capable of
+training and improving to almost any extent."  She turned to Mrs
+Jefferson.  "You have some power," she said, "you saw me the other
+night.  No one else did."
+
+Mrs Jefferson looked highly gratified.  "Oh, Madame Zairoff," she
+cried, "I'd give up everything in the world to have your wonderful
+gifts."
+
+"Even Worth's gowns?" said the princess, smiling.  "What about the
+pleasant vanities we talked so much about?"
+
+"Oh, bother the vanities.  I've found out life can be much more
+interesting than when it's merely frivolous," said the American,
+heartily.  "Is there anything I _could_ do to become an occultist?"
+
+Colonel Estcourt laughed outright.
+
+"My dear Mrs Jefferson," he said, "the life is not by any means easy,
+or gratifying.  I think you had better consider it carefully, and weigh
+it well in the balance with the `creations' of Worth, and the
+magnificence of your diamonds, for somehow the two things won't pull
+together, and you haven't even learnt the A B C of occult science yet."
+
+"No," she said, seating herself, "I suppose not.  Well, please begin my
+lesson."
+
+"This will not be a lesson," he said, gravely, "only an illustration.
+May I ask you all to be seated?"
+
+They took various chairs and seats, and the princess threw herself on
+the couch, nestling back among her favourite white bear-skins, with a
+smile on her lips.
+
+Colonel Estcourt removed a rose-shaded lamp from the stand, and placed
+it behind her, so that the light should not shine directly into her
+eyes.  They were all watching her intently in the full expectation of
+something to be done or said that was mysterious and awe-inspiring.
+Colonel Estcourt then seated himself on a chair opposite the couch.  For
+a moment their eyes met and lingered in the gaze, then hers closed
+softly, and she seemed to sleep as peacefully and gently as a child in
+its cradle.
+
+No one spoke.  Suddenly a voice broke the stillness--clear, sweet, and
+sonorous--the voice of the sleeper, though her lips scarcely moved, nor
+did the placid expression of her face change.
+
+"What you desire to know is the storied wisdom of past ages, the fruits
+of the deepest and most earnest research of which human minds are
+capable.  These fruits have only been gathered after long and painful
+study, after severe training of every spiritual faculty, and the
+repression of all lower material inclinations and desires.  There is but
+one among all who listen to me now, capable of undertaking such study,
+or undergoing such an ordeal.  The day is at hand when he may choose it,
+if he will.  They who bid me speak now, are willing that you should
+learn some lesson to benefit yourselves, and your fellow men.  They say
+to you, oh Poet, `Perfect those gifts of your higher nature--yet be not
+of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but
+lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.'  Look upon every
+beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who
+has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the
+beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression.
+Remember there is a great truth in your favourite lines that _Karma_ is
+`the total of a soul.'  `The things it did, the thoughts it had, the
+Self it wove, with woof of viewless time, crossed on the warp invisible
+of acts.'
+
+"There is another listener here--one who has wrestled with the secrets
+of Nature.  To him I say, `Be not over vain of the triumph gained by
+simple accident of discovery.  Turn that discovery to better uses than
+the mere amassing of wealth.  Let the poor, the sick, the needy, gain
+health and happiness from your hands, and let their voices bless you for
+good wrought amongst them.  For nothing is so pitiful and so abhorrent,
+as the worship of wealth, and the selfishness that eats like a corroding
+poison into the purer metal of the rich man's nature.  Your wealth will
+only bring you happiness in so far as you use it to benefit others less
+fortunate though equally deserving.  It is given you as a trial, not as
+a reward.'--To you, oh Cynic, this message have I also: `Your eyes see
+but through a veil of dulled and vainglorious senses.  Some truths you
+have learned, but in the passage through your mind they take the colour
+and shape of a distorted and embittered fancy.  You have a work to do,
+and influence to do it; but your _will_ must become humble, and then you
+will learn the sweets of true knowledge, and be able to disseminate
+truth and wisdom.  Now you absorb it into your own mind, for your own
+satisfaction, and for the poor triumph of discouraging those of lower
+mental stature, and of natures lighter and grosser than your own.  To
+the true Prophet and the true Philosopher, he himself is insignificant
+before the great truths he has learnt, and his personal identity
+willingly sinks into obscurity, so only that these truths may live.'"
+
+For a moment she ceased, and the different faces looked curiously
+uncomfortable and startled at so keen a vivisection of their inner
+natures.  Mrs Ray Jefferson, however, feeling that she had been left
+out in the cold, and anxious for a special message to herself, broke the
+spell of silence.
+
+"Have you nothing to say to me, Princess?" she asked beseechingly.
+
+Then the beautiful head moved restlessly to and fro, and the face grew
+less placid and child-like.  She began to speak, but now the words came
+in quick disjointed fragments.  "They are standing beside you," she
+said.  "I must go.  You may come with us, but not Julian.  Keep Julian
+away... keep Julian away--"
+
+"What does she mean?" cried Mrs Jefferson, turning pale.  "And--oh
+gracious!" she cried to her husband, "look at Colonel Estcourt.  Is he
+going to faint?"
+
+All eyes turned on the Colonel.  He lay back on his chair white and
+gasping.  "My God," he cried in a stifled voice.  "My power is gone.  I
+can't hold her.  I can't keep her back."
+
+"She is speaking again," cried Mrs Jefferson, in low, terrified
+accents.  "Oh, I don't half like this.  I wish we had never come."
+
+Then a great awe and stillness fell upon them, and, despite their terror
+and their dread, every ear strained to catch the quick disjointed words
+that fell from those strange lips.
+
+"I am there...  How still the streets are, and the snow--how fast it
+falls.  How they crowd round the palace gate to-night.  Stay the horses,
+Ivan, I will speak...  Do not fear, my friends, your lives are safe.  I
+promise it...  What is this?  My rooms?  How lonely they seem to-night.
+`Alone?'  Yes, I am always alone.  No lover's step has ever echoed
+through this cloistered silence.  Alone and sad.  Ah! how I have
+suffered here...  What do they say?  It will be over soon, it will be
+over--soon.  One more battle to win.  Let me summon all my courage now.
+I have faced ordeals before.  I have forgotten woman's fears, and laid
+aside woman's scruples.  Am I not pure?  Am I not brave?  Yet why do I
+tremble?  One weakness is still unconquered, one human love burns true
+and deep and steadfast in my heart.  I cannot cast it out.  I _will_
+not; not even at your bidding; not even to make my task easier.
+
+"A step in the silence...  Who dares to cross my chambers?  Courage, my
+heart.  There on the threshold stand my White Guard.  Why should I fear?
+Courage! courage--"
+
+Like one carved in stone Julian Estcourt sat and listened.  The dumb
+misery of a terrible expectance held every faculty in its iron grasp.
+Was his dread to be realised?  It seemed so, for all control was gone; a
+higher power had seized the reins.  She had escaped him, and an awful
+horror was upon him lest he, in his folly and shortsightedness, had
+assembled these people here only to be witnesses of the degradation of
+the peerless creature he had so worshipped and so loved.
+
+Spell-bound they sat and listened.  The rose-light from the lamps
+falling upon their white, set faces, and the quivering tension of their
+silent lips.
+
+The voice of the sleeper went ruthlessly on.
+
+Scene for scene, word for word, Julian Estcourt lived over again through
+the wild dread and horror of his Dream.  Scene for scene, word for word,
+those wondering startled listeners saw it reproduced, though to them it
+was scarce intelligible.
+
+At last, she reached the point where his endurance had snapped beneath
+the strain of terror, but now his every force was numbed--his will
+seemed paralysed.  One feeble helpless effort he made to lock those lips
+into silence, to chain back the self-betrayal of that unconscious
+speech.  But love had made him weak, and passion had stifled the acute,
+unerring faculties that once had bent her to his will.
+
+He was powerless.  He could only sit there dumbly--stupidly--listening
+for what he felt was sure as the death stroke of the headsman to his
+doomed victim.  Again she spoke.
+
+"The steps approach--yet what is this?  _They_ are no longer on the
+threshold.  I am alone--alone--yet what new power is mine!  My brain
+seems to dilate!  Space can scarce confine me!  All fear has gone!  And
+it is thus you would have me yield to your brutal force, your drunken,
+degraded senses!  Back, rash intruder, touch me not if you value life!"
+
+Then, while still they gazed and listened, the beautiful figure rose
+slowly from its nest of snowy furs; rose and stood in its wonderful,
+indolent, voluptuous grace, upright before those dazed and awe-struck
+eyes.
+
+But a change came over the quiet beauty of the face.  It seemed as if
+some hidden flame had sprung to life and flashed and quivered in the
+wide-opened eyes and convulsed features.  They saw a shiver, such as
+shakes the sea before the blast of the coming tempest, bend and sway the
+perfect form...
+
+Once, twice, her lips opened, but no words came.  At last she seemed to
+force the channels of speech, but the low sweet music of her voice was
+harsh and jangled with passion.
+
+"My answer?  Take it, ravisher and murderer of innocence and youth!
+Die! in your crimes--Die!"
+
+She stretched out her arm.  There came a hoarse cry, a crash, a heavy
+fall.  Julian Estcourt lay upon the floor, white and senseless as the
+dead.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIFTEEN.
+
+EXPIATION.
+
+A severe attack of her "suppressed" enemy, and a nervous headache, the
+result of the shock of the previous evening, had driven Mrs Ray
+Jefferson to the Turkish bath as early as ten o'clock the morning after
+that strange exhibition of Clairvoyance.
+
+She had the rooms all to herself, and as she leant back in her
+comfortable chair and dabbled her pretty bare feet in warm water; she
+reflected in a troubled and disjointed fashion over all that had
+occurred since that eventful morning when the beautiful "mystery" had
+appeared before her standing in that curtained archway, which indeed
+looked a prosaic enough portal, and not by any means the sort of
+threshold for the development of occult science, or psychical marvels.
+
+"She's completely unsettled me," she murmured plaintively.  "How I wish
+I had never gone to her rooms last night.  And that poor Colonel
+Estcourt--I wonder if he'll ever recover--they say he's never moved nor
+spoken since they took him away last night.  I wonder what she really
+meant, and if she did kill that man she spoke of.  I don't think it's
+possible.  I expect she only _willed_ it, and that's not murder.  Ugh!"
+and she shuddered even in the warmth of the hot room where she had
+selected to go first.  "If the story leaks out--though I hope to
+goodness it won't--how delighted that horrid Mrs Masterman will be.
+She never liked her.  Well I'm--if that isn't the princess herself
+coming in!  Her trance doesn't seem to have hurt her."
+
+Slowly and languidly through the open doorway, the beautiful figure
+swept in and up to the smaller chamber where sat the little American.
+
+As Mrs Ray Jefferson looked at her, she became conscious of some subtle
+intangible change that had shadowed, as it were, the marvellous beauty
+of her face and form.  Her large deep eyes had lost their lustre, her
+clear creamy skin looked dull and opaque.  Even the magnificent hair
+seemed to have been robbed of its sheen, and here and there amidst its
+masses gleamed a silvery thread.
+
+Up to this moment her age had been a matter of much speculation, varying
+from eighteen to twenty-six.  Now one would have said unhesitatingly
+that she was a woman of at least thirty years, and a woman who did not
+carry those years lightly.
+
+She sat down by Mrs Jefferson, and spoke in a low nervous voice.  "I
+knew I should find you here," she said.  "I want your help.  I think you
+have always been my friend here.  Do me one service.  Tell me what
+occurred in my room last night."
+
+"Do you mean to say?" asked Mrs Jefferson, amazed, "that you don't
+know?"
+
+"Should I ask if I did?" she said, mournfully.  "A great weight and
+terror are on my soul--yet I cannot explain them.  In some of my trances
+I keep the memory of all I see; in some I lose it.  I know nothing of
+what I said last night after you spoke and I parted from Julian.  It was
+your voice that came between us.  You have great psychic power; but it
+is undeveloped."
+
+"Good gracious!" cried Mrs Jefferson; "then, if I'm responsible for
+what happened last night, I'll have nothing more to do with Occultism as
+long as I live."
+
+"I can't tell why it was," resumed the Princess, mournfully.  "The chain
+of communication broke, and I got away, and my great dread was that
+Julian should suffer."
+
+"Well, your dread is realised," said Mrs Jefferson.  "Don't you know
+he's very ill?"
+
+She started, and grew deadly white.  "Ill--Julian!  No; I did not know.
+What is it?--serious do they say?"
+
+"Very.  Some shock to the brain.  You know he was far from strong.  He
+was only home from India on sick leave."
+
+The princess was silent for a moment.  Her face looked inexpressibly
+mournful.  Involuntarily her hand went to her heart, and she looked at
+Mrs Jefferson with sad, appealing eyes.  "I have suffered a great
+deal," she said, slowly.  "I only bore it for his sake--for the hope
+they gave me that one day we should meet, and love, and taste the
+happiness of life together.  Tell me, was it anything I said or revealed
+that shocked him?"
+
+"Well--I guess so," said the little American, uneasily.  "Of course, to
+us it was all mysterious; but he seemed to make it out, and at last,
+when you rose up and stretched out your arm and cried out, `Die! in your
+crimes--_die_!' the Colonel just gave a sort of gasp, and crash went his
+chair, and he lay there on the floor like a dead creature.  We were all
+finely scared, I can tell you.  The odd part was that you went to sleep
+again like a child, just as simply and quietly as possible, and my
+husband and the poet, and poor old Diogenes, they got the Colonel to his
+room, and laid him on the bed, and we sent for a doctor, and he's not
+conscious yet.  That's all I can tell you."
+
+The Princess Zairoff leant back on her chair white and silent.  She
+asked no more questions.
+
+Presently an attendant appeared with obsequious inquiries.  The princess
+suddenly shivered.  "Ask them," she said, abruptly, "to bring up the
+temperature to 300 degrees, I am cold."
+
+"Cold!"  Mrs Jefferson stared.  "I guess it's as well I came here
+first," she said, "for certainly I can't stand it 50 degrees hotter than
+it is at present.  I'll go into the second room.  You see I'm reversing
+the usual order this morning.  Three, two, one, instead of one, two,
+three.  I'll sit just here by the door, so that we can still talk if you
+wish.  I look like a boiled lobster, I'm sure."
+
+Princess Zairoff said nothing.  But when the American had withdrawn, she
+threw herself down on a couch near the wall.  By choosing it she was out
+of sight of anyone in the adjoining room, though able to converse if she
+wished.
+
+That she did not wish was very evident.  No sooner was she alone than an
+expression of intense anguish came over her face.  Her hands locked
+themselves together, an agony far beyond the weakness of tears was in
+her beautiful eyes.
+
+"I have lost him," she cried, in a stifled whisper.  "Lost him for
+ever... and it was for this we were brought together...  For this I was
+commanded to learn the secret of my failure.  Yes, I, who thought myself
+so wise, have failed...  Failed at the crucial test, because my passions
+governed me... because my heart was weak, for sake of love...  Oh, my
+lost strength--my lost self-restraint...  Must I again tread the weary
+road... and only overcome to fail again?"
+
+She turned aside and hid her face in her hands, while all that dusky
+veil of rippling hair fell over her like a cloud.
+
+"I am so human still," she moaned--"so human that, woman-like, I
+deceived myself, and dreamt of love perfected here, when I might have
+known--I might have known...  But, oh, to lose him thus!  To stand
+before his eyes shamed, sin-stricken, criminal--I cannot bear that--it
+is beyond my strength..."
+
+A new fierce passion seemed suddenly to take possession of her soul.
+She raised herself once more, and the old lovely light and splendour
+glowed in her eyes.
+
+"There is but one way to win his forgiveness," she cried breathlessly.
+"He will pity me then... his heart will soften... he will remember what
+I said on that strange happy night when once again we met...  I am but a
+woman who loves.  Earth holds no weaker thing... and I loved you,
+Julian... you only--you alone! always--always--always.  Men live for
+love--a woman can but die.  For the life I took I give my own--it is
+just...  Yet if but once, oh, beloved, I could see your pitying eyes,
+and hear your tender voice... and know that you--forgave..."
+
+The light faded from her face once more.  Only a hunted, despairing
+creature leaned back on that solitary couch.
+
+A voice came shrilly from the outer room: "Are you all right, Princess?
+Can you really bear that heat?"
+
+Monotonously--vaguely--her own voice replied: "I am all right--I do not
+even feel the heat."
+
+Then, all again grew still, and her eyes closed, and her heart beat in a
+dull, laboured way.
+
+Once more the shrill voice reached her; but it sounded far off, and
+indistinct: "I hope you won't go off to sleep, like you did the last
+time, Princess; you frightened me terribly."
+
+The effort to reply was harder to make; yet once again the slow, sweet
+voice vibrated through the hushed and stifling heat:
+
+"I shall not sleep--do not be alarmed."
+
+Five minutes later, when Mrs Ray Jefferson lifted her eyes from an
+examination of her suffering foot, she was surprised to see the Princess
+standing in the archway of the further room, exactly as she had done on
+the first occasion of her visiting the Baths.
+
+"Are you going?" she called out.  "How is it I never saw you pass
+through the room?"
+
+There was no answer--only the deep, wonderful eyes looked mournfully
+back at her, and, even as she met the gaze, the form seemed to fade
+away--the archway was vacant.
+
+With a faint cry, Mrs Jefferson sprang to her feet, and rushed into the
+inner room.  The intense heat stifled, and drove her back; but not
+before she saw the Princess lying on the couch, where she had left
+her... lying with closed eyes and folded hands; while on her pale, sad
+lips a faint smile seemed still to shed its lingering life.
+
+The frantic calls of the terrified woman summoned the attendants.  In a
+moment, that motionless figure was lifted and carried into the adjoining
+chamber.
+
+But human science and human aid were powerless before a greater Mystery
+than the Princess Zairoff had embodied.  The "Mystery of Death!"
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mystery of a Turkish Bath, by 
+E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
+
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