companionship; but when it is a mere gust of fire, bright and fierce as the sudden leaping light of a volcano, then it withers everything at a touch,--faith, honor, truth,--and dies into dull ashes in which no spark remains to warm or inspire man’s higher nature. Better death than such a love,--for it works misery on earth; but who can tell what horrors it may not create Hereafter!” The Princess looked at him with a strange, weird gleam in her dark eyes. “You are right,” she said. “It is just the Hereafter that men never think of. I am glad you, at least, acknowledge the truth of the life beyond death.” “I am bound to acknowledge it,” returned the Doctor; “inasmuch as I know it exists.” Gervase glanced at him with a smile, in which there was something of contempt. “You are very much behind the age, Doctor,” he remarked lightly. “Very much behind indeed,” agreed Dr. Dean composedly. “The age rushes on too rapidly for me, and gives no time to the consideration of things by the way. I stop,--I take breathing space in which to think; life without thought is madness, and I desire to have no part in a mad age.” At that moment they entered the Red Saloon, a stately apartment, which was entirely modelled after the most ancient forms of Egyptian architecture. The centre of the vast room was quite clear of furniture, so that the Princess Ziska’s guests went wandering up and down, to and fro, entirely at their ease, without crush or inconvenience, and congregated in corners for conversation; though if they chose they could recline on low divans and gorgeously-cushioned benches ranged against the walls and sheltered by tall palms and flowering exotics. The music was heard to better advantage here than in the hall where the company had first been received; and as the Princess moved to a seat under the pale green frondage of a huge tropical fern and bade her two companions sit beside her, sounds of the wildest, most melancholy and haunting character began to palpitate upon the air in the mournful, throbbing fashion in which a nightingale sings when its soul is burdened with love. The passionate tremor that shakes the bird’s throat at mating-time seemed to shake the unseen instruments that now discoursed strange melody, and Gervase, listening dreamily, felt a curious contraction and aching at his heart and a sense of suffocation in his throat, combined with an insatiate desire to seize in his arms the mysterious Ziska, with her dark fathomless eyes and slight, yet voluptuous, form,--to drag her to his breast and crush her there, whispering: “Mine!--mine! By all the gods of the past and present--mine! Who shall tear her from me,--who dispute my right to love her--ruin her--murder her, if I choose? She is mine!”