In another moment he was gone, but notwithstanding his powerful command, for a while I could not sleep.  I understood that he was offering Yva to me, but upon what terms?  That was the question.  With her was to go great dominion over the kingdoms of the earth.  I could not help remembering that always this has been and still is Satan’s favourite bait.  To me it did not particularly appeal.  I had been ambitious in my time—­who is not that is worth his salt?  I could have wished to excel in something, literature or art, or whatever it might be, and thus to ensure the memory of my name in the world.

Of course this is a most futile desire, seeing that soon or late every name must fade out of the world like an unfixed photograph which is exposed to the sun.  Even if it could endure, as the old demigod, or demidevil, Oro, had pointed out, very shortly, by comparison with Time’s unmeasured vastness, the whole solar system will also fade.  So of what use is this feeble love of fame and this vain attempt to be remembered that animates us so strongly?  Moreover, the idea of enjoying mere temporal as opposed to intellectual power, appealed to me not at all.  I am a student of history and I know what has been the lot of kings and the evil that, often enough, they work in their little day.

Also if I needed any further example, there was that of Oro himself.  He had outlived the greatness of his House, as a royal family is called, and after some gigantic murder, if his own story was to be believed, indulged in a prolonged sleep.  Now he awoke to find himself quite alone in the world, save for a daughter with whom he did not agree or sympathise.  In short, he was but a kind of animated mummy inspired by one idea which I felt quite sure would be disappointed, namely, to renew his former greatness.  To me he seemed as miserable a figure as one could imagine, brooding and plotting in his illuminated cave, at the end of an extended but misspent life.

Also I wondered what he, or rather his ego, had been doing during all those two hundred and fifty thousand years of sleep.  Possibly if Yva’s theory, as I understood it, were correct, he had reincarnated as Attila, or Tamerlane, or Napoleon, or even as Chaka the terrible Zulu king.  At any rate there he was still in the world, filled with the dread of death, but consumed now as ever by his insatiable and most useless finite ambitions.

Yva, also!  Her case was his, but yet how different.  In all this long night of Time she had but ripened into one of the sweetest and most gentle women that ever the world bore.  She, too, was great in her way, it appeared in her every word and gesture, but where was the ferocity of her father?  Where his desire to reach to splendour by treading on a blood-stained road paved with broken human hearts?  It did not exist.  Her nature was different although her body came of a long line of these power-loving kings.  Why this profound difference of the spirit?  Like everything else it was a mystery.  The two were as far apart as the Poles.  Everyone must have hated Oro, from the beginning, however much he feared him, but everyone who came in touch with her must have loved Yva.