e your hand. I love you, my pretty pet,--your Manetho loves
you!"

The slow sentences ended. Nurse had laid her unsightly head beside his
on the pillow, and the two were happy in each other. O piteous,
revolting, solemn sight! Those faces, grief-smitten, old; long ago, in
passionate and lawless youth, they had perchance lain thus and
murmured loving words. And now for a moment they met and loved
again,--while death knocked at their chamber door!

But Balder had perceived a startling significance in Manetho's words.
He took Gnulemah by the hand and led her to the eastern window. A
flash greeted them, creating a momentary world, which started from the
womb of night, and vanished again before one could say "It is there!"
Then followed a long-drawn, intermittent rumble, as if the fragments
of the spectre world were tumbling avalanche-wise into chaos.

"I remember now about the dandelions," Balder said. "Was not Nurse
with us then?"

"Yes," answered Gnulemah; "and it was she and Hiero who took me from
you. But why does he call her Salome? and who is Manetho?"

Balder did not reply. He leant against the window-frame and gazed out
into the black storm. Knowing what he now did, it required no great
stretch of ingenuity to unravel Manetho's secret.--He turned to
Gnulemah, and, taking her in his arms, kissed her with a defiant kind
of ardor.

"What is it?" she whispered, clinging to him with a reflex of his own
unspoken emotion.

"We are safe!--But that man shall not die without hearing the truth,"
he added, sternly.

Again there was a dazzling lightning-flash, and the thunder seemed to
break at their very ears. By a quick, sinuous movement, Gnulemah freed
herself from his arm and looked at him with her grand eyes,--night-black,
lit each with a sparkling star. Her feminine intuition perceived a
change in him, though she could not fathom its cause. It jarred the
fineness of their mutual harmony.

"Our happiness should make others' greater," said she.

He looked into her eyes with a gaze so ardent that their lids drooped;
and the tone of his answer, though lover-like, had more of masculine
authority in it than she had yet heard from him.

"My darling, you do not know what wrong he has done you--and others.
It is only justice that he should learn how God punishes such as he!"

"Will not God teach him?" said Gnulemah, trembling to oppose the man
she loved, yet by love compelled to do so.

Balder paused, and looked to