She smiled a tender, indulgent smile, but, making no reply, unfastened her mantle. Her robe was of sea-green silk, with an iris pattern. Snared in the low-cut corsage were beautiful breasts, that seemed as though they longed to burst forth--a flow of imprisoned beauty. Clasped around each of the nude, dark arms was a golden snake, with glittering emerald eyes. Around the throat of darkest cream were two rows of pearls--pearls that had meant the loss of many lives. “If you remember me it is because we have met in the land of dreams, or in some land of the mind, where it seems that dreams come true. I am Callisto, daughter of Lamia. During eighteen hundred years my tomb has had peace. It is in the flowerful fields and woods of Daphne, near to the hills where were the voluptuous dwelling-places of Antioch. But in these days even the tombs have no abiding home. They took me to Paris, and my shadow or spirit followed. For a long time I slept in the icy caves of the Louvre. I should have been there for ever and ever if it had not been for a great and grand pagan, a really holy man, Louis Ménard. He is the only living man in all this land who knows to-day the signs and symbols of the ancient divinities. Before my tomb he solemnly pronounced the words that of old gave a nightly and transitory life to the unhappy dead! Therefore behold me. For seven hours each night I may go through your miserable city....” “Oh, child of the older world,” I cried, “how you must see the change the world sorrows under!” “Yes, and yet no. I find the dwellings dark, the dresses ugly, the sky sorrowful. How oddly you dress for such a climate. I find that life in general is more stupid, and that human beings look much less happy than in the older and more golden days. But if there is one thing that greatly stupefies me, it is to see that you have still so many of the things that I knew of old. What ... in eighteen hundred years have you all made nothing more, nothing new? Is that so really and truly? What I have seen in the houses, the open air, the streets, is that all? Have you not succeeded in finding a new thing? If not, what misery, my friend!” My attitude of astonishment was my sole reply. She smiled, the lovely red lips parting over her mother-of-pearl teeth most enchantingly. Then she murmured in explanation--