“In that moment of intense consciousness a cry breaks the stillness, and searching among the marbles he finds a dying woman.  Gathering some fruit, he gives her to eat, and they walk together, she considering him as saviour and lord, he wrapped in the contemplation of the end.  They are the end, and all paling fascination, which is the world, is passing from them, and they are passing from it.  And the splendour of gold and red ascends and spreads—­crown and raiment of a world that has regained its primal beauty.

“‘We are alone,’ the woman says.  ’The world is ours; we are as king and queen, and greater than any king or queen.’

“Her dark olive skin changes about the neck like a fruit near to ripen, and the large arms, curving deeply, fall from the shoulder in superb indolences of movement, and the hair, varying from burnt-up black to blue, curls like a fleece adown the shoulders.  She is large and strong, a fitting mother of man, supple in the joints as the young panther that has just bounded into the thickets; and her rich almond eyes, dark, and moon-like in their depth of mystery, are fixed on him.  Then he awakes to the danger of the enchantment; but she pleads that they, the last of mankind, may remain watching over each other till the end; and seeing his eyes flash, her heart rejoices.  And out of the glare of the moon they passed beneath the sycamores.  And listening to the fierce tune of the nightingales in the dusky daylight there, temptation hisses like a serpent; and the woman listens, and drawing herself about the man, she says—­

“’The world is ours; let us make it ours for ever; let us give birth to a new race more great and beautiful than that which is dead.  Love me, for I am love; all the dead beauties of the race are incarnate in me.  I am the type and epitome of all.  Was the Venus we saw yesterday among the myrtles more lovely than I?’

“But he casts her from him, asking in despair (for he loves her) if they are to renew the misery and abomination which it required all the courage and all the wisdom of all the ages to subdue?  He calls names from love’s most fearful chronicle—­Cleopatra, Faustina, Borgia.  A little while and man’s shameful life will no longer disturb the silence of the heavens.  But no perception of life’s shame touches the heart of the woman.  ‘I am love,’ she cries again.  ’Take me, and make me the mother of men.  In me are incarnate all the love songs of the world.  I am Beatrice; I am Juliet.  I shall be all love to you—­Fair Rosamond and Queen Eleanor.  I am the rose!  I am the nightingale!’

“She follows him in all depths of the forests wherever he may go.  In the white morning he finds her kneeling by him, and in blue and rose evening he sees her whiteness crouching in the brake.  He has fled to a last retreat in the hills where he thought she could not follow, and after a long day of travel lies down.  But she comes upon him in his first sleep, and with amorous arms uplifted, and hair shed to the knee, throws herself upon him.  It is in the soft and sensual scent of the honeysuckle.  The bright lips strive, and for an instant his soul turns sick with famine for the face; but only for an instant, and in a supreme revulsion of feeling he beseeches her, crying that the world may not end as it began, in blood.  But she heeds him not, and to save the generations he dashes her on the rocks.