What was the life-story of these two, who, of a truth, were beautiful in their lives, and in their death were not divided?

I closed my eyelids, and imagination, taking up the thread of thought, shot its swift shuttle back across the ages, weaving a picture on their blackness so real and vivid in its details that I could almost for a moment think that I had triumphed o’er the Past, and that my spirit’s eyes had pierced the mystery of Time.

I seemed to see this fair girl form—­the yellow hair streaming down her, glittering against her garments snowy white, and the bosom that was whiter than the robes, even dimming with its lustre her ornaments of burnished gold.  I seemed to see the great cave filled with warriors, bearded and clad in mail, and, on the lighted dais where Ayesha had given judgment, a man standing, robed, and surrounded by the symbols of his priestly office.  And up the cave there came one clad in purple, and before him and behind him came minstrels and fair maidens, chanting a wedding song.  White stood the maid against the altar, fairer than the fairest there—­purer than a lily, and more cold than the dew that glistens in its heart.  But as the man drew near she shuddered.  Then out of the press and throng there sprang a dark-haired youth, and put his arms about this long-forgotten maid, and kissed her pale face in which the blood shot up like lights of the red dawn across the silent sky.  And next there was turmoil and uproar, and a flashing of swords, and they tore the youth from her arms, and stabbed him, but with a cry she snatched the dagger from his belt, and drove it into her snowy breast, home to the heart, and down she fell, and then, with cries and wailing, and every sound of lamentation, the pageant rolled away from the arena of my vision, and once more the past shut to its book.

Let him who reads forgive the intrusion of a dream into a history of fact.  But it came so home to me—­I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination?  What is imagination?  Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is the soul’s thought.

In an instant the whole thing had passed through my brain, and She was addressing me.

“Behold the lot of man,” said the veiled Ayesha, as she drew the winding sheets back over the dead lovers, speaking in a solemn, thrilling voice, which accorded well with the dream that I had dreamed:  “to the tomb, and to the forgetfulness that hides the tomb, must we all come at last!  Ay, even I who live so long.  Even for me, oh Holly, thousands upon thousands of years hence; thousands of years after you hast gone through the gate and been lost in the mists, a day will dawn whereon I shall die, and be even as thou art and these are.  And then what will it avail that I have lived a little longer, holding off death by the knowledge that I have