Nor king nor slave I know, Nor tribes, nor shibboleths; But Life-in-Death I know-- Yea, Nin-ki-gal I know-- Life's Queen and Death's. And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant? The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed. One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two, and then returned home and went to bed,--but not to sleep. For me there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be quelled--till that sound of Winnie's song in the street could be stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and taking out the amulet, proceeded to examine the I facets as I did once before when I heard in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father:-- 'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that materialism is intolerable--is hell itself--to the heart that has known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal, madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you _dare_ not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the heart a ray of hope.' And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a waking dream. III The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as it the pains at the heart were flickering up through the flesh--where had I seen it? For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me, that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that illumination was perpetual! 'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,' I exclaimed. Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck. And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed murmuring in my ears, 'Fenella Stanley's dead and dust, and that's why she can make you put that cross in your feyther's tomb, and she will, she will.' I turned the cross round: the front of it was now next to my skin. Sharp as needles were those diamond and ruby points as I sat and gazed in the glass. Slowly a sensation arose on my breast, of pain that was a pleasure wild and new. _I was feeling the facet_. But the tears trickling down, salt, through my moustache tears of laughter; for Sinfi Lovell seemed again murmuring, 'For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy.'