d
before him and behind him came minstrels and fair maidens, chanting a
wedding song. White stood the maid against the altar, fairer than
the fairest there--purer than a lily, and more cold than the dew that
glistens in its heart. But as the man drew near she shuddered. Then out
of the press and throng there sprang a dark-haired youth, and put his
arms about this long-forgotten maid, and kissed her pale face in which
the blood shot up like lights of the red dawn across the silent sky. And
next there was turmoil and uproar, and a flashing of swords, and they
tore the youth from her arms, and stabbed him, but with a cry she
snatched the dagger from his belt, and drove it into her snowy breast,
home to the heart, and down she fell, and then, with cries and wailing,
and every sound of lamentation, the pageant rolled away from the arena
of my vision, and once more the past shut to its book.

Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of
fact. But it came so home to me--I saw it all so clear in a moment,
as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past,
present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination?
Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the
soul's thought.

In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and _She_ was
addressing me.

"Behold the lot of man," said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the winding
sheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn, thrilling voice,
which accorded well with the dream that I had dreamed: "to the tomb, and
to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last! Ay,
even I who live so long. Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands
of years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gate
and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be
even as thou art and these are. And then what will it avail that I have
lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I have
wrung from Nature, since at last I too must die? What is a span of ten
thousand years, or ten times ten thousand years, in the history of time?
It is as naught--it is as the mists that roll up in the sunlight; it
fleeth away like an hour of sleep or a breath of the Eternal Spirit.
Behold the lot of man! Certainly it shall overtake us, and we shall
sleep. Certainly, too, we shall awake and live again, and again shall
sleep, and so on and on, through perio