No goddess, suddenly descending from the skies to earth, could have looked more royally beneficent than she, and Vasho made rapid signs of entire devotion to her service. “No,” she said--“You are your master’s man. He will need your help--when I am gone!” The negro’s countenance expressed a sudden dismay--and she laughed. “Yes--when I am gone!” she repeated, “and that will be very soon! I am made for all the world now!” His eyes rolled despairingly,--he made eloquent and beseeching signs of appeal. “You will be sorry?” she said. “Yes--I daresay you will! Now go along,--they want you downstairs. It is foolish to be sorry for anything.” She smiled at him as he backed from her presence, looking utterly miserable, and disappeared. Left alone, she touched a glass of wine with her lips, but quickly set it down. “What a curious taste!” she said. “I used to like it,--I don’t like it at all now. I’m not thirsty and I’m not hungry. I want nothing. It’s enough for me to breathe!” She moved slowly up and down with an exquisite floating grace, a perfect vision of imperial beauty, her rose-red “rest gown” with its white fur lining trailing about her; and presently, sitting down by the open window, she inhaled the warm summer air, and after a while watched the moon rise through a foam of white cloud, which seemed to have sprayed itself sheer down from the Alpine snows. Her thoughts were clear; her consciousness particularly active,--and, with a kind of new self-possession and intellectuality, she took herself, as it were, mentally to pieces, and examined each section of herself as under a psychological microscope. “Let me be quite sure of my own identity,” she said, half aloud. “I am Diana May--and yet I am not Diana May! I have lost the worn old shell of my former personality, and I have found another personality which is not my own, and yet somehow is the real Me!--the Me for whom I have been searching and crying ever since I could search and cry!--the Me I have dreamed of as rising in the shape of a Soul from my dead body! I am clothed with a life vesture made of strange and imperishable stuff,--I cannot begin to describe or understand it, except as an organisation free from all pain and grossness--and what is more positive still--free from all feeling!” She paused here, interested in the puzzle of her thoughts. Raising her eyes, she looked out at the divine beauty of the night. “Yes,” she went on musing--“That is the strangest part of it!--I have _no_ feeling. This is the work of science--therefore my condition will be within reach of all who care to accept it. I look out at the garden,--the moonlight,--but not as I used to look. _They_ have no feeling, and seem just a natural part of myself. They do not move me to any more sensation than the recognition that they live as I do, _with_ me and _for_ me. If I can get hold of myself at all surely, I think my chief consciousness is that of power,--power, with no regard for its exercise or result.”