golden hair, the lovely
face seemed almost unsurpassed in its witchery.

She wore a sea-green dress of some soft fabric that floated in the
wind as she moved, and over her shoulders was wound a white fleecy
mantle fastened at the throat by a costly green cameo, which also
secured a spray of lemon flowers that lavished their fragrance on the
bright warm air. Closing her parasol, she walked down to the ruined
Temple, and approached the wonderful cipollino columns that bear such
mysterious attestation of the mutations of land and sea, of time and
human religions. Since the days of Agrippina and Julia, had a fairer
prouder face shone under the hoary marble shafts, and mirrored itself
in the marvellous mosaic floor, than that which now looked calmly
down on the placid water flowing so silently over the costly
pavements, where sovereigns once reverently trod?

In imagination she beheld the vast throng of worshippers, who two
thousand years ago had filled the magnificent court, where the sun
was now shining unimpeded; and above the low musical babble of
wavelets breaking upon the chiselled marbles, rose the hum of the
generations sleeping to-day in the columbaria, and the chant of the
priests before the statue of Serapis, which sacrilegious hands had
borne away from his ancient throne. Were the blue caverns of the
Mediterranean not deep enough to entomb these colossal relics of that
dim vast Past, whose feebly ebbing tide still drifts so mournfully,
so solemnly, so mysteriously upon our listening souls? Did
compassionate Neptune, tenderly guarding the ruins of his own
desecrated fane, once resonant with votive paeans now echoing only
sea-born murmurs, refuse sepulture to Serapis, and again and again
return to the golden light of land the sculptured friezes, that could
find permanent rest neither upon sea not shore?

To-day the lonely woman, standing amid crumbling cornices and
architraves, wondered whether the sunken pavement of the Serapeon
were a melancholy symbol of her own blighted youth, never utterly
lost to view, often overwhelmed by surging waves of bitterness, hate,
and despair, but now and then lifted by memory to the light, and
found as fresh and glowing as in the sacred bygone? To-day buried
beneath the tide of sorrow, to-morrow shining clear and imperishable?

Gazing out across the sapphire sea that mirrored a cloudless sapphire
sky, Mrs. Orme's beautiful solemn face seemed almost a part of the
classic surro