ody twitched. He
was learning the difference between theory and practice,--dream and
fact. His subtle schemes had been dramas enacted by variations of
himself. No allowance had been made for the working of spirit on
spirit; even his special part had been designed too narrowly, with but
a single governing emotion, whereas he already found himself assailed
by an anarchic host of them.

"Gnulemah!" he cried at length, "my study,--my thought,--my
purpose,--body of my hopes and prayers!" He knelt and bowed himself at
her feet, in the Oriental posture of worship, and went on with rising
passion:--"My secrets have bloomed in thy beauty,--been music in thy
voice,--darkened in thine eyes! O my flower--fascinating,
terrible!--the time is ripe for the gathering, for the smelling of the
perfume, for the kissing of the petals! I must yield thee up, O my
idol! but in thy hand are my life and my reason,--yea, Gnulemah, thou
art all I am!"

The tears, gestures, voice, with which Manetho thus delivered himself,
shocked the Northern taste of Helwyse. Through the semi-scriptural,
symbolic language, he fancied he could discern a basis of materialism
so revolting that the man of the world--the lover now!--listened with
shame and anger. Here was a professed worshipper of Gnulemah, who
ascribed to her no nobler worth than to be the incarnation of his own
desires and passions! It was abject self-idolatry, thought Balder,
masquerading as a lofty form of idealization.

The priest's mind was in a more complex condition than Balder
imagined. His absorption in Gnulemah, if only as she was the
instrument of his dominant purpose, must have been complete; the
success (as he deemed it) of his life was staked on her. But, in
addition to this, the unhappy man had, unwittingly, and with the
vehemence of his ill-ordered nature, grown to love the poison-draught
brewed for his enemy! When the enemy's lips touched the cup, did
Manetho first become aware that it brimmed with the brewer's own
life-blood!

Yet it might have been foreseen. He loved her, not because she was
identified with his aims, nor even because she was beautiful, but (and
not inconsistently with his theoretical belief in her devilishness)
because she was pure and true. Under the persuasion that he was
influencing her nature in a manner only possible, if at all, to a
moral and physical despot, he had himself been ruled by her stronger
and loftier spirit. The transcendent cunning on which