thou, Nin-ki-gal?
What showest thou, Nin-ki-gal?
Have pity, O Queen of Queens!

NIN-KI-GAL.

Nor king nor slave I know,
Nor tribes, nor shibboleths;
But Life-in-Death I know--
Yea, Nin-ki-gal I know--
Life's Queen and Death's.

And what was the effect upon me of these communings with the
ancestors whose superstitions I have, perhaps, been throughout this
narrative treating in a spirit that hardly becomes their descendant?

The best and briefest way of answering this question is to confess
not what I thought, as I went on studying my father's book, its
strange theories and revelations, but what I did. I read the book all
day long: I read it all the next day. I cannot say what days passed.
One night I resumed my wanderings in the streets for an hour or two,
and then returned home and went to bed,--but not to sleep. For me
there was no more sleep till those ancestral voices could be
quelled--till that sound of Winnie's song in the street could be
stopped in my ears. For very relief from them I again leapt out of
bed, lit a candle, unlocked the cabinet, and taking out the amulet,
proceeded to examine the I facets as I did once before when I heard
in the Swiss cottage these words of my stricken father:--

'Should you ever come to love as I have loved, you will find that
materialism is intolerable--is hell itself--to the heart that has
known a passion like mine. You will find that it is madness, Hal,
madness, to believe in the word "never"! You will find that you
_dare_ not leave untried any creed, howsoever wild, that offers the
heart a ray of hope.'

And then while the candle burnt out dead in the socket I sat in a
waking dream.

III

The bright light of morning was pouring through the window. I gave a
start of horror, and cried, 'Whose face?' Opposite to me there seemed
to be sitting on a bed the figure of a man with a fiery cross upon
his breast. That strange wild light upon the face, as it the pains at
the heart were flickering up through the flesh--where had I seen it?
For a moment when, in Switzerland, my father bared his bosom to me,
that ancestral flame had flashed up into his dull lineaments. But
upon the picture of 'The Sibyl' in the portrait-gallery that
illumination was perpetual!

'It is merely my own reflex in a looking-glass,' I exclaimed.

Without knowing it I had slung the cross round my neck.

And then Sinfi Lovell's voice seemed