I had beheld enough; but my eyes, sternly fascinated, gazed on in my own despite. In the foreground of the spectral plain an irregular chasm opened, whose perpendicular walls plunged straight down into pitch darkness. On the further verge of this chasm I saw an object which, at the first glance, I took to be a shapeless boulder, arrested there on its way from the mountain summit to the depths below. But, as my glance continued to dwell upon it, it took on form and meaning--a meaning which made my pulses torpid with dismay--which I strove to reject and disbelieve, but which revealed itself in defiance of my efforts with inevitable distinctness. Was it a carven statue? Or had that petrified figure once had life? Some day in the immeasurable past had it stood erect, moved and breathed, loved and hated? The last survivor of its race, had it witnessed the destruction of all existence, and then lain down defiant, unrepentant, and calm, and composed itself to the stony sleep from which not time itself should see the awakening? There he lay, the nameless Titan, more alone than a mortal brain dare conceive, a being who had spoken his last word, were it curse or blessing--who had done his last deed, were it good or evil--æons before the first vague dawn of life awoke upon our earth--there he lay, lifeless and soulless, yet with the power to shake my soul to-night, and even to assert a weird rivalship with me in the heart of the woman I loved! For this was the figure whose likeness I had found that evening in Diana's portfolio; it was with his ghastly fate that her girlish fancy had conceived a lofty sympathy: with him her pure thoughts had dwelt throughout her youthful years, dreaming who could tell what dreams of strange romance!--seeing in him, who was revealed to herself alone of all women, who knows what stern ideal of supernatural manhood! So had this immemorial relic of another world swayed the life and moulded the character of a mortal creature of to-day, giving to her feminine heart the companionship which it demanded, but which, in the world of men, had been thus far denied her.