it. She felt the dreadful
brevity of a woman's, of any woman's triumph over the world of men. She
felt the ghastly shortness of the life of physical beauty. She seemed to
hear the sound of the movement of Time rushing away, to see the darkness
of the End closing about her, as now the dimness of this desolate shrine
of beauty and love grew deeper round her.

Far up, near the forbidding gloom of the mighty roof, there rose a
fiercely petulant sound, a chorus of angry cries. Large shadows with
beating wings came and went rapidly through the forest of heavy columns.
The monstrous bats of Hathor were disturbed in their brooding reveries.
A heavy smell, like the odour of a long-decaying past, lifted itself, as
if with a slow, determined effort, to Mrs. Armine's nostrils. And ever
the light of day failed slowly as she and Nigel went onward, drawn in
despite of themselves by the power of the darkness, and by the
mysterious perfumes that swept up from the breast of death.

At last they came into the sanctuary, the "Holy of Holies" of Denderah,
where once were treasured images of the gods of Egypt, where only the
King or his high priest might venture to come, at the fete of the New
Year. They stood in its darkness, this woman who was longing to return
to the unbridled life of her sensual and disordered past, and this man
who, quite without vanity, believed that he had been permitted to redeem
her from it.

The guardian of the temple, who had followed them softly, now lit a
ribbon of magnesium, and there sprang into a vague and momentary life
reliefs of the King performing ceremonies and accomplishing sacrifices.
Then the darkness closed again. And the fragmentary and short vision
seemed to Mrs. Armine like the vision of her little life as a beautiful
woman, and the coming of the darkness to blot it out like the coming of
the darkness of death to cover her for ever with its impenetrable
mantle.

What she had told Meyer Isaacson in his consulting-room was true. When
she thought sincerely, she believed in no future life. She could not
conceive of a spirit life. Nor could she conceive of the skeletons of
the dead in some strange resurrection being reclothed with the flesh
which she adored, being inhabited again by the vitality which makes
skeleton and flesh living man or woman. This life was all to her. And
when the light in which it existed and was perceived died away and was
consumed, she believed that the vision could never r