sank swiftly away.

The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and
gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture of pure
interpenetrating inward light. She began to moan, and sigh deep sighs,
then murmur as holding colloquy with a dividual self: her queendom was
no longer whole; it was divided against itself. One moment she would
exult as over her worst enemy, and weep; the next she would writhe as in
the embrace of a friend whom her soul hated, and laugh like a demon.
At length she began what seemed a tale about herself, in a language
so strange, and in forms so shadowy, that I could but here and there
understand a little. Yet the language seemed the primeval shape of one
I knew well, and the forms to belong to dreams which had once been mine,
but refused to be recalled. The tale appeared now and then to touch upon
things that Adam had read from the disparted manuscript, and often to
make allusion to influences and forces--vices too, I could not help
suspecting--with which I was unacquainted.

She ceased, and again came the horror in her hair, the sparkling and
flowing alternate. I sent a beseeching look to Mara.

"Those, alas, are not the tears of repentance!" she said. "The true
tears gather in the eyes. Those are far more bitter, and not so good.
Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in
the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he
abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account.
It will be so with her."

She went nearer and said,

"Will you restore that which you have wrongfully taken?"

"I have taken nothing," answered the princess, forcing out the words
in spite of pain, "that I had not the right to take. My power to take
manifested my right."

Mara left her.

Gradually my soul grew aware of an invisible darkness, a something
more terrible than aught that had yet made itself felt. A horrible
Nothingness, a Negation positive infolded her; the border of its being
that was yet no being, touched me, and for one ghastly instant I seemed
alone with Death Absolute! It was not the absence of everything I felt,
but the presence of Nothing. The princess dashed herself from the settle
to the floor with an exceeding great and bitter cry. It was the recoil
of Being from Annihilation.

"For pity's sake," she shrieked, "tear my heart out, but let me live!"

With that there fell upon her, and upon us also wh