All these years she had loved in cheerful patience and perfect faith the man for whose memory she had lived in maiden widowhood--and now, who could measure the depth of the darkness, darker than the shadow of death itself, that had fallen across her life, severing the past from the present with a chasm that seemed impassable, and leaving the future but a barren, loveless waste to be trodden by her in weariness and loneliness until the end! All these years she had loved an ideal man, one of her own splendid race, the very chosen of the earth, as pure in his unblemished manhood as she was in the stainless maidenhood that she had held so sacred for his sake even while she thought him dead--and, lo! the years had passed, and he had come back to life, but how? Hers was not the false innocence of ignorance. She knew the evil and the good, and because she knew both shrank from contamination with the horror born of knowledge. She had seen both Olga’s letter and Alan’s, and those two terrible sentences, “They have served my turn, and I have done with them,” and “She is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend,” kept ringing their fatal changes through her brain in pitiless succession, forcing all the revolting possibilities of their meaning into her tortured soul till her reason seemed to reel under their insupportable stress. Mocking voices spoke to her out of the night, and told her of the unholy love that such a woman would, in the plenitude of her unnatural power, have for such a man; how she would subdue him, and make him not only her lover but her slave; how she would humble his splendid manhood, and play with him until her evil fancy was sated, and then cast him aside--as she had done--like a toy of which she had tired. Better a thousand times that he had died as his murdered comrades had died--in the northern snowdrift into which this Syren of the Skies had cast them, to sleep the sleep that knew neither dreams nor waking! Better for him and her that he had gone before her into the shadows, and had remained her ideal love until, hand in hand, they could begin their lives anew upon a higher plane of existence. As these thoughts passed and repassed through her mind with pitiless persistence, her lovely face grew rigid and white under the starlight, and, but for the nervous twining and untwining of her fingers as her hands clasped and unclasped behind her, her motionless form might have been carved out of stone. For the first time since peace had been proclaimed on earth, a hundred and thirty-two years ago, the flames of war had burst forth again, and for the first time in the story of her race the snake had entered the now no longer enchanted Eden of Aeria.