to ask no question, she would have known and been satisfied.  But hours must pass before she could see him again, and every minute spent without him grew more full of anxiety and disturbing passion than the last.  The wild love-blossom that springs into existence in a single moment has elements which do not enter into the gentler being of that other love which is sown in indifference, and which grows up in slowly increasing interest, tended and refreshed in the pleasant intercourse of close acquaintance, to bud and bloom at last as a mild-scented garden flower.  Love at first sight is impatient, passionate, ruthless, cruel, as the year would be, if from the calendar of the season the months of slow transition were struck out; if the raging heat of August followed in one day upon the wild tempests of the winter; if the fruit of the vine but yesterday in leaf grew rich and black to-day, to be churned to foam to-morrow under the feet of the laughing wine treaders.

Unorna felt that the day would be intolerable if she could not hear from other lips the promise of a predestined happiness.  She was not really in doubt, but she was under the imperious impulse of a passion which must needs find some response, even in the useless confirmation of its reality uttered by an indifferent person—­the spirit of a mighty cry seeking its own echo in the echoless, flat waste of the Great Desert.

Then, too, she placed a sincere faith in the old man’s answers to her questions, regardless of the matter inquired into.  She believed that in the mysterious condition between sleep and waking which she could command, the knowledge of things to be was with him as certainly as the memory of what had been and of what was even now passing in the outer world.  To her, the one direction of the faculty seemed no less possible than the others, though she had not yet attained alone to the vision of the future.  Hitherto the old man’s utterances had been fulfilled to the letter.  More than once, as Keyork Arabian had hinted, she had consulted his second sight in preference to her own, and she had not been deceived.  His greater learning and his vast experience lent to his sayings something divine in her eyes; she looked upon him as the Pythoness of Delphi looked upon the divinity of her inspiration.

The irresistible longing to hear the passionate pleadings of her own heart solemnly confirmed by the voice in which she trusted overcame at last every obstacle.  Unorna bent over the sleeper, looking earnestly into his face, and she laid one hand upon his brow.

“You hear me,” she said, slowly and distinctly.  “You are conscious of thought, and you see into the future.”

The massive head stirred, the long limbs moved uneasily under the white robe, the enormous, bony hands contracted, and in the cavernous eyes the great lids were slowly lifted.  A dull stare met her look.

“Is it he?” she asked, speaking more quickly in spite of herself.  “Is it he at last?”