“Not human?” echoed Gervase, his black eyes dilating with a sudden amazement--“What do you mean?” The little Doctor rubbed his nose impatiently and seemed sorry he had spoken. “I mean--let me see! What do I mean?” he said at last meditatively--“Oh, well, it is easy enough of explanation. There are plenty of people like the Princess Ziska to whom I would apply the words ‘not human.’ She is all beauty and no heart. Again--if you follow me--she is all desire and no passion, which is a character ‘like unto the beasts which perish.’ A large majority of men are made so, and some women,--though the women are comparatively few. Now, so far as the Princess Ziska is concerned,” continued the Doctor, fixing his keen, penetrative glance on Gervase as he spoke, “I frankly admit to you that I find in her material for a very curious and complex study. That is why I have come after her here. I have said she is all desire and no passion. That of itself is inhuman; but what I am busy about now is to try and analyze the nature of the particular desire that moves her, controls her, keeps her alive,--in short. It is not love; of that I feel confident; and it is not hate,--though it is more like hate than love. It is something indefinable, something that is almost occult, so deep-seated and bewildering is the riddle. You look upon me as a madman--yes! I know you do! But mad or sane, I emphatically repeat, the Princess is _not human_, and by this expression I wish to imply that though she has the outward appearance of a most beautiful and seductive human body, she has the soul of a fiend. Now, do you understand me?” “It would take Œdipus himself all his time to do that,”--said Gervase, forcing a laugh which had no mirth in it, for he was conscious of a vaguely unpleasant sensation--a chill, as of some dark presentiment, which oppressed his mind. “When you know I do not believe in the soul, why do you talk to me about it? The soul of a fiend,--the soul of an angel,--what are they? Mere empty terms to me, meaning nothing. I think I agree with you though, in one or two points concerning the Princess; _par exemple_, I do not look upon her as one of those delicately embodied purities of womanhood before whom we men instinctively bend in reverence, but whom, at the same time, we generally avoid, ashamed of our vileness. No; she is certainly not one of the “‘Maiden roses left to die Because they climb so near the sky, That not the boldest passer-by Can pluck them from their vantage high.’ And whether it is best to be a solitary ‘maiden-rose’ or a Princess Ziska, who shall say? And human or inhuman, whatever composition she is made of, you may make yourself positively certain that Denzil Murray is just now doing his best to persuade her to be a Highland châtelaine in the future. Heavens, what a strange fate it will be for _la belle Egyptienne_!” “Oh, you think she _is_ Egyptian then?” queried Dr. Dean, with an air of lively curiosity.