I was still gazing at it when Bickley said in a voice of amazement: 

“I say, look here, in the other coffin.”

I turned, looked, and nearly collapsed on the floor of the vault, since beauty can sometimes strike us like a blow.  Oh! there before me lay all loveliness, such loveliness that there burst from my lips an involuntary cry: 

“Alas! that she should be dead!”

A young woman, I supposed, at least she looked young, perhaps five or six and twenty years of age, or so I judged.  There she lay, her tall and delicate shape half hidden in masses of rich-hued hair in colour of a ruddy blackness.  I know not how else to describe it, since never have I seen any of the same tint.  Moreover, it shone with a life of its own as though it had been dusted with gold.  From between the masses of this hair appeared a face which I can only call divine.  There was every beauty that woman can boast, from the curving eyelashes of extraordinary length to the sweet and human mouth.  To these charms also were added a wondrous smile and an air of kind dignity, very different from the fierce pride stamped upon the countenance of the old man who was her companion in death.

She was clothed in some close-fitting robe of white broidered with gold; pearls were about her neck, lying far down upon the perfect bosom, a girdle of gold and shining gems encircled her slender waist, and on her little feet were sandals fastened with red stones like rubies.  In truth, she was a splendid creature, and yet, I know not how, her beauty suggested more of the spirit than of the flesh.  Indeed, in a way, it was unearthly.  My senses were smitten, it pulled at my heart-strings, and yet its unutterable strangeness seemed to awake memories within me, though of what I could not tell.  A wild fancy came to me that I must have known this heavenly creature in some past life.

By now Bastin had joined us, and, attracted by my exclamation and by the attitude of Bickley, who was staring down at the coffin with a fixed look upon his face, not unlike that of a pointer when he scents game, he began to contemplate the wonder within it in his slow way.

“Well, I never!” he said.  “Do you think the Glittering Lady in there is human?”

“The Glittering Lady is dead, but I suppose that she was human in her life,” I answered in an awed whisper.

“Of course she is dead, otherwise she would not be in that glass coffin.  I think I should like to read the Burial Service over her, which I daresay was never done when she was put in there.”

“How do you know she is dead?” asked Bickley in a sharp voice and speaking for the first time.  “I have seen hundreds of corpses, and mummies too, but never any that looked like these.”

I stared at him.  It was strange to hear Bickley, the scoffer at miracles, suggesting that this greatest of all miracles might be possible.

“They must have been here a long time,” I said, “for although human, they are not, I think, of any people known to the world to-day; their dress, everything, shows it, though perhaps thousands of years ago—­” and I stopped.