The three stood for a moment joined in a circle, through which what incongruous passions were circulating!  But Gnulemah soon withdrew the hand held by Manetho, and sent it to seek the one clasped by Balder.  The priest turned cold, and stepped back; and, after an appearance of mental struggle, said huskily,—­

“Hiero is forgotten; you are all for the stranger!”

“You never told me who lived beyond the wall,” returned Gnulemah, with simple dignity; and added, “You are no less to me than before, but Balder is—­my love!” The last words came shyly from her lips, and she swayed gently, like a noble tree, towards him she named.

Manetho’s lips worked against each other, and his body twitched.  He was learning the difference between theory and practice,—­dream and fact.  His subtle schemes had been dramas enacted by variations of himself.  No allowance had been made for the working of spirit on spirit; even his special part had been designed too narrowly, with but a single governing emotion, whereas he already found himself assailed by an anarchic host of them.

“Gnulemah!” he cried at length, “my study,—­my thought,—­my purpose,—­body of my hopes and prayers!” He knelt and bowed himself at her feet, in the Oriental posture of worship, and went on with rising passion:—­“My secrets have bloomed in thy beauty,—­been music in thy voice,—­darkened in thine eyes!  O my flower—­fascinating, terrible!—­the time is ripe for the gathering, for the smelling of the perfume, for the kissing of the petals!  I must yield thee up, O my idol! but in thy hand are my life and my reason,—­yea, Gnulemah, thou art all I am!”

The tears, gestures, voice, with which Manetho thus delivered himself, shocked the Northern taste of Helwyse.  Through the semi-scriptural, symbolic language, he fancied he could discern a basis of materialism so revolting that the man of the world—­the lover now!—­listened with shame and anger.  Here was a professed worshipper of Gnulemah, who ascribed to her no nobler worth than to be the incarnation of his own desires and passions!  It was abject self-idolatry, thought Balder, masquerading as a lofty form of idealization.

The priest’s mind was in a more complex condition than Balder imagined.  His absorption in Gnulemah, if only as she was the instrument of his dominant purpose, must have been complete; the success (as he deemed it) of his life was staked on her.  But, in addition to this, the unhappy man had, unwittingly, and with the vehemence of his ill-ordered nature, grown to love the poison-draught brewed for his enemy!  When the enemy’s lips touched the cup, did Manetho first become aware that it brimmed with the brewer’s own life-blood!

Yet it might have been foreseen.  He loved her, not because she was identified with his aims, nor even because she was beautiful, but (and not inconsistently with his theoretical belief in her devilishness) because she was pure and true.  Under the persuasion that he was influencing her nature in a manner only possible, if at all, to a moral and physical despot, he had himself been ruled by her stronger and loftier spirit.  The transcendent cunning on which he had prided himself, as regarded his plan of educating Gnulemah, had amounted to little more than imbecile inaction.