“Then you were born four hundred years ago?” “Yes, and never. I was never born. I am Da Vasco. I have always been. My home is in the sun.” Her delicately stenciled brows drew quizzically to interrogation, though she said nothing. From a gold-wrought box beside her on the divan she pinched what seemed a powder between a fragile and almost transparent thumb and forefinger, and her thin beautiful lips curved to gentle mockery as she casually tossed the powder into the great tripod. A sheen of smoke arose and in a moment was lost to sight. “Look!” she commanded. And Torres, approaching the great bowl, gazed into it. What he saw, the rest of his party never learned. But the Queen herself leaned forward and gazing down from above, saw with him, her face a beautiful advertisement of gentle and pitying mockery. And what Torres himself saw was a bedroom and a birth in the second story of the Bocas del Toro house he had inherited. Pitiful it was, with its last secrecy exposed, as was the gently smiling pity in the Queen’s face. And, in that flashing glimpse of magic vision, Torres saw confirmed about himself what he had always guessed and suspected. “Would you see more,” the Queen softly mocked. “I have shown you the beginning of you. Look now, and behold your ending.” But Torres, too deeply impressed by what he had already seen, shuddered away in recoil. “Forgive me, Beautiful Woman,” he pleaded. “And let me pass. Forget, as I shall hope ever to forget.” “It is gone,” she said, with a careless wave of her hand over the bowl. “But I cannot forget. The record will persist always in my mind. But you, O Man, so young of life, so ancient of helmet, have I beheld before this day, there in my Mirror of the World. You have vexed me much of late with your portending. Yet not with the helmet.” She smiled with quiet wisdom. “Always, it seems to me, I saw a chamber of the dead, of the long dead, upright on their unmoving legs and guarding through eternity mysteries alien to their faith and race. And in that dolorous company did it seem that I saw one who wore your ancient helmet.... Shall I speak further?” “No, no,” Torres implored. She bowed and nodded him back. Next, her scrutiny centred on Francis, whom she nodded forward. She stood up upon the dais as if to greet him, and, as if troubled by the fact that she must gaze down on him, stepped from the dais to the floor so that she might gaze up into his face as she extended her hand. Hesitatingly he took her hand in his, then knew not what next to do. Almost did it appear that she read his thought, for she said: “Do it. I have never had it done to me before. I have never seen it done, save in my dreams and in the visions shown me in my Mirror of the World.”