e greatness of his House, as a royal family is called,
and after some gigantic murder, if his own story was to be believed,
indulged in a prolonged sleep. Now he awoke to find himself quite
alone in the world, save for a daughter with whom he did not agree or
sympathise. In short, he was but a kind of animated mummy inspired by
one idea which I felt quite sure would be disappointed, namely, to renew
his former greatness. To me he seemed as miserable a figure as one could
imagine, brooding and plotting in his illuminated cave, at the end of an
extended but misspent life.

Also I wondered what he, or rather his ego, had been doing during all
those two hundred and fifty thousand years of sleep. Possibly if Yva's
theory, as I understood it, were correct, he had reincarnated as Attila,
or Tamerlane, or Napoleon, or even as Chaka the terrible Zulu king.
At any rate there he was still in the world, filled with the dread
of death, but consumed now as ever by his insatiable and most useless
finite ambitions.

Yva, also! Her case was his, but yet how different. In all this long
night of Time she had but ripened into one of the sweetest and most
gentle women that ever the world bore. She, too, was great in her way,
it appeared in her every word and gesture, but where was the ferocity
of her father? Where his desire to reach to splendour by treading on a
blood-stained road paved with broken human hearts? It did not exist.
Her nature was different although her body came of a long line of these
power-loving kings. Why this profound difference of the spirit? Like
everything else it was a mystery. The two were as far apart as the
Poles. Everyone must have hated Oro, from the beginning, however much he
feared him, but everyone who came in touch with her must have loved Yva.

Here I may break into my personal narrative to say that this, by their
own confession, proved to be true of two such various persons as Bastin
and Bickley.

"The truth, which I am sure it would be wrong to hide from you,
Arbuthnot," said the former to me one day, "is that during your long
illness I fell in love, I suppose that is the right word, with the
Glittering Lady. After thinking the matter over also, I conceived that
it would be proper to tell her so if only to clear the air and prevent
future misunderstandings. As I remarked to her on that occasion, I had
hesitated long, as I was not certain how she would fill the place of the
wife of the incumbent of