we did so we each took Job's cold hand in ours and shook it.
It was a rather ghastly ceremony, but it was the only means in our
power of showing our respect to the faithful dead and of celebrating his
obsequies. The heap beneath the white garment we did not uncover. We had
no wish to look upon that terrible sight again. But we went to the pile
of rippling hair that had fallen from her in the agony of that hideous
change which was worse than a thousand natural deaths, and each of us
drew from it a shining lock, and these locks we still have, the sole
memento that is left to us of Ayesha as we knew her in the fulness of
her grace and glory. Leo pressed the perfumed hair to his lips.

"She called to me not to forget her," he said hoarsely; "and swore that
we should meet again. By Heaven! I never will forget her. Here I swear
that if we live to get out of this, I will not for all my days have
anything to say to another living woman, and that wherever I go I will
wait for her as faithfully as she waited for me."

"Yes," I thought to myself, "if she comes back as beautiful as we knew
her. But supposing she came back _like that!_"[*]

[*] What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that
nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred
depends--at any rate, in the first instance--upon their
personal appearance. If we lost them, and found them again
dreadful to look on, though otherwise they were the very
same, should we still love them? --L. H. H.

Well, and then we went. We went, and left those two in the presence of
the very well and spring of Life, but gathered to the cold company of
Death. How lonely they looked as they lay there, and how ill assorted!
That little heap had been for two thousand years the wisest, loveliest,
proudest creature--I can hardly call her woman--in the whole universe.
She had been wicked, too, in her way; but, alas! such is the frailty
of the human heart, her wickedness had not detracted from her charm.
Indeed, I am by no means certain that it did not add to it. It was after
all of a grand order, there was nothing mean or small about Ayesha.

And poor Job too! His presentiment had come true, and there was an end
of him. Well, he has a strange burial-place--no Norfolk hind ever had a
stranger, or ever will; and it is something to lie in the same sepulchre
as the poor remains of the imperial _She_.

We looked our last upon them and the indescribable ros