hild. Then he stirred himself into pursuit, crying,
"Stay, fool, stay!" but desisted instantly, for the girl was as fleet as
a fawn, and could run surely where his feet would stumble. Already she
was out of sight in the thick of the trees.

"Go, fool, go!" he shouted. "If you are crazy enough to repel
greatness!" And flinging himself upon the fallen column, he buried his
face in his hands to keep back the bitter tears.

V

LYCABETTA

Lying there in his wild rage, he babbled to himself.

"Am I mad? Shall I, Sicily, be defied by this cold Amazon? She shall
burn as a witch for this; she shall burn! She has put some spell upon
me, and she shall burn for my burning. I would not have her now, but she
shall die in pain."

Drowned in his frenzy of thwarted passion and baffled anger, the King
was unaware that a woman had entered the open space from the
mountain-path, and was moving with light steps across the grasses
towards the spot where he sat and ate his heart. The new-comer was
beautiful with a beauty so different from that of the girl whose kingdom
was the hill-top that few to whom the one seemed perfect would have
found the other all-conquering fair. Tall and imperious as some evil
empress of old Rome, her black hair bound with ivy leaves of gold, her
fine body draped in strangely dyed silks--snake-colored, blue and green
and golden-scaled--that shot a shimmering iridescence with every
movement of the limbs, whose whiteness their transparency rather
betrayed than veiled, she trod the earth with such an air as Balkis may
have worn when she came a-visiting Solomon. The painters of the antique
world would have welcomed in that voluptuous flesh, in the poppy of her
mouth, in the midnight of those eyes that glowed with the fires of
Thessalian incantations, their ideal for some image of the goddess of
all-conquering desire. The Sophists of the antique world would have read
her story charactered in every lithe line, in every appealing motion,
and saluted in her the priestess of sheer appetite, for whom the gods
were dead, indeed, yet living in their material form--Dionysus as wine,
Aphrodite as the act of love, Apollo as the kindling sunlight.

As Balkis came to seek Solomon, so this woman came to the
mountain-summit seeking a king. But she had thought to greet him coming
out of the gray church, and it was with a start of surprise that she
saw the glittering figure crouched in an attitude of woe upon the fallen