Doubtless he should have stood firm, and by years of patient self-sacrifice showed her that she was wrong. But how many of us are capable of such asceticism? How many of us would stand for long years in the outer darkness, knowing himself to be guiltless of the crime laid to his charge? This woman--pure wife, affectionate mother, as she was--had acted as if she were above the weaknesses of human nature. She had arrogated to herself the functions of the Deity in judging and condemning a poor human soul, who, weary with beseeching for what it never received, fell away in despair into the gulf of sin and misery. Who was wrong--the man who sought evil in despair, or the woman whose coldness and purity had denied him the mercy which would have saved him? CHAPTER XXX. CLEOPATRA VICTRIX. "To my chariot wheels have I bound him, To bear him in triumph away; As master and king have I crowned him, To reign but the length of a day. I woo but to kiss and betray him, We meet but a moment to part; In the hour of his joy will I slay him, My wheels will go over his heart." Mrs. Veilsturm's drawing-room was not by any means an artistic apartment, being full of violent contrasts in the way of decoration and furniture, yet not without a certain picturesqueness of its own. It was bizarre, gaudy, fantastic, strange, and a faithful reflection of the curious mind of its mistress. The European side of her nature inspired her with a certain amount of artistic taste, while the African blood in her veins made her delight in brilliant colouring and barbaric ornamentation. The eyes ached as they rested on the confused mass of tints, variegated as a flower-garden, and yet there was a certain design and harmony throughout, something like the tangled patterns of those Oriental carpets, those Indian shawls, which represent the cloudy splendours haunting an Eastern mind. The paper on the walls of this room, oblong and lofty, was of a dark-red tint, stamped with golden sunflowers rising from their velvety-green leaves. Delicate lace curtains of milky white, interwoven with threads of silver, fell before the three long windows, from under massive gilt cornices. The carpet was of black and yellow stripes in undulating lines, like the skin of a tiger, and here and there a rug of silky-white hair contrasted curiously with the fantastic ground upon which it rested. The furniture was of dark walnut, upholstered with bright yellow satin, smooth and shining as the inside of a buttercup. In the corners of the room stood slender palms with heavily-drooping leaves, vividly-green ferns with feathery fronds, prickly, fleshy cactus and spiky, fan-shaped plants, suggestive of tropical skies--some rising from the porous red jars of Egypt, others springing from misshapen vases of porcelain, on which, in crimson and green, sprawled the sacred Chinese dragon, and a few growing in shallow basins of pale-yellow pottery.