The first ceremony of silent greeting absolved, the Persian's visitor permitted the black silken cloak which had enveloped her from head to toe, to fall away, revealing a form exquisitely proportioned. The ivory pallor of the throat, which rose like a marble column from matchless shoulders, and the whiteness of the bare arms, seemed even enhanced by the dusky background whose incense-laden pall seemed to oppress the very walls. "I am trusting you to-night with unreserved confidence," the woman spoke in her rich, vibrant voice. "Many serve me from motives of selfishness and fear. Do you serve me, because I trust you." She laid her white hand frankly upon his arm and the Persian, isolated above and below the strongest impulses of humanity, shivered under her touch. "What is it you desire?" he questioned after a pause. "If you possess the knowledge with which the vulgar credit you," the woman said slowly, not without an air of mockery in her tone, "I hardly need reveal to you the motives which prompted this visit! You knew them, ere I came, even as you knew of my coming!" "You speak truly," said Hormazd slowly, now completely master of himself. "For even to the hour it was revealed to me!" The woman scanned him with a searching look. "Yet I had confided in none!" she said musingly. "Tell me then who I am!" "You are Theodora!" "When have we met before?"-- "Not in this life, but in a previous existence. Our souls touched then, predestined to cross each other on a future plane." She removed her silken vizor and faced him. The dark eyes at once challenged and besought. No sculptor could have chiselled those features on which a divinity had recklessly squandered all it had to bestow for good or for evil. No painter could have reproduced the face which had wrought such havoc in the hearts of men. Like summer lightnings in a dark cloudbank, all the emotions of the human soul seemed to have played therein and left it again, forging it in the fires of passion, but leaving it more beautiful, more mysterious than before. The Oriental regarded her in silence, as she stood before him in the flickering flame of the brazier. "In some previous existence, you say?" she said with dreamy interest. "Who was I then--and who were you?" "Two driftless spirits on the driftless sea of eternity," he replied calmly. "Foredoomed to continue our passage till our final destiny be fulfilled." "And this destiny is known to you?" "Else I had watched in vain. But you--queen and sorceress--do you believe in the message?" She pondered. "I believe," she said slowly, "that we make for ourselves the destiny to which hereafter we must submit. I believe that some dark power can foretell that destiny, and more--compel it!"-- Hormazd bowed ever so slightly. There was a dawning gleam of satire in his brilliant eyes, a glimpse which was not lost on her. Again the question came. "What is it you desire?"