phery of which appeared the joints between blocks of black marble.
The light on the floor showed close fitting slabs of the same material.
I found afterward that the elliptical wall as well was of black marble,
absorbing the little light that reached it. The roof was the long half
of an ellipsoid, and the opening in it was over one of the foci of the
ellipse of the floor. I fancied I caught sight of reddish lines, but
when I would have examined them, they were gone.

All at once, a radiant form stood in the centre of the darkness,
flashing a splendour on every side. Over a robe of soft white, her hair
streamed in a cataract, black as the marble on which it fell. Her
eyes were a luminous blackness; her arms and feet like warm ivory. She
greeted me with the innocent smile of a girl--and in face, figure, and
motion seemed but now to have stepped over the threshold of womanhood.
"Alas," thought I, "ill did I reckon my danger! Can this be the woman I
rescued--she who struck me, scorned me, left me?" I stood gazing at her
out of the darkness; she stood gazing into it, as if searching for me.

She disappeared. "She will not acknowledge me!" I thought. But the next
instant her eyes flashed out of the dark straight into mine. She had
descried me and come to me!

"You have found me at last!" she said, laying her hand on my shoulder.
"I knew you would!"

My frame quivered with conflicting consciousnesses, to analyse which
I had no power. I was simultaneously attracted and repelled: each
sensation seemed either.

"You shiver!" she said. "This place is cold for you! Come."

I stood silent: she had struck me dumb with beauty; she held me dumb
with sweetness.

Taking me by the hand, she drew me to the spot of light, and again
flashed upon me. An instant she stood there.

"You have grown brown since last I saw you," she said.

"This is almost the first roof I have been under since you left me," I
replied.

"Whose was the other?" she rejoined.

"I do not know the woman's name."

"I would gladly learn it! The instinct of hospitality is not strong
in my people!" She took me again by the hand, and led me through the
darkness many steps to a curtain of black. Beyond it was a white stair,
up which she conducted me to a beautiful chamber.

"How you must miss the hot flowing river!" she said. "But there is a
bath in the corner with no white leeches in it! At the foot of your
couch you will find a garment. When you come down, I