hat could be indulged in with impunity, and that any such
attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and probably end
upon a scaffold.

"The law," she laughed with scorn--"the law! Canst thou not understand,
oh Holly, that I am above the law, and so shall my Kallikrates be also?
All human law will be to us as the north wind to a mountain. Does the
wind bend the mountain, or the mountain the wind?"

"And now leave me, I pray thee, and thou too, my own Kallikrates, for
I would get me ready against our journey, and so must ye both, and your
servant also. But bring no great quantity of things with thee, for I
trust that we shall be but three days gone. Then shall we return hither,
and I will make a plan whereby we can bid farewell for ever to these
sepulchres of Kor. Yea, surely thou mayst kiss my hand!"

So we went, I, for one, meditating deeply on the awful nature of the
problem that now opened out before us. The terrible _She_ had evidently
made up her mind to go to England, and it made me absolutely shudder
to think what would be the result of her arrival there. What her powers
were I knew, and I could not doubt but that she would exercise them
to the full. It might be possible to control her for a while, but her
proud, ambitious spirit would be certain to break loose and avenge
itself for the long centuries of its solitude. She would, if necessary,
and if the power of her beauty did not unaided prove equal to the
occasion, blast her way to any end she set before her, and, as she could
not die, and for aught I knew could not even be killed,[*] what was
there to stop her? In the end she would, I had little doubt, assume
absolute rule over the British dominions, and probably over the whole
earth, and, though I was sure that she would speedily make ours the most
glorious and prosperous empire that the world has ever seen, it would be
at the cost of a terrible sacrifice of life.

[*] I regret to say that I was never able to ascertain if
_She_ was invulnerable against the ordinary accidents of
life. Presumably this was so, else some misadventure would
have been sure to put an end to her in the course of so many
centuries. True, she offered to let Leo slay her, but very
probably this was only an experiment to try his temper and
mental attitude towards her. Ayesha never gave way to
impulse without some valid object.--L. H. H.

The whole thing sounded like a dream or some e