ing, "I know what you have been tormenting me for! You have not
succeeded, nor shall you succeed! You shall yet find me stronger than
you think! I will yet be mistress of myself! I am still what I have
always known myself--queen of Hell, and mistress of the worlds!"

Then came the most fearful thing of all. I did not know what it was; I
knew myself unable to imagine it; I knew only that if it came near me I
should die of terror! I now know that it was LIFE IN DEATH--life dead,
yet existent; and I knew that Lilith had had glimpses, but only glimpses
of it before: it had never been with her until now.

She stood as she had turned. Mara went and sat down by the fire. Fearing
to stand alone with the princess, I went also and sat again by the
hearth. Something began to depart from me. A sense of cold, yet not what
we call cold, crept, not into, but out of my being, and pervaded it. The
lamp of life and the eternal fire seemed dying together, and I about
to be left with naught but the consciousness that I had been alive.
Mercifully, bereavement did not go so far, and my thought went back to
Lilith.

Something was taking place in her which we did not know. We knew we did
not feel what she felt, but we knew we felt something of the misery
it caused her. The thing itself was in her, not in us; its reflex, her
misery, reached us, and was again reflected in us: she was in the outer
darkness, we present with her who was in it! We were not in the outer
darkness; had we been, we could not have been WITH her; we should have
been timelessly, spacelessly, absolutely apart. The darkness knows
neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the
darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.

Something was gone from her, which then first, by its absence, she knew
to have been with her every moment of her wicked years. The source of
life had withdrawn itself; all that was left her of conscious being was
the dregs of her dead and corrupted life.

She stood rigid. Mara buried her head in her hands. I gazed on the face
of one who knew existence but not love--knew nor life, nor joy, nor
good; with my eyes I saw the face of a live death! She knew life only to
know that it was dead, and that, in her, death lived. It was not merely
that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing.
She had killed her life, and was dead--and knew it. She must DEATH IT
for ever and ever! She had tried her hardest to