Her voice ceased—­a mist came before me for a moment—­and when this cleared, the same scene was presented to me under the glimmer of a ghostly moon.  And she who looked so like myself, lay dead at the foot of the great Statue, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes closed, her mouth smiling as in sleep, while beside her raved and wept her priestly lover, invoking her by every tender name, clasping her lifeless body in his arms, covering her face with useless passionate kisses, and calling her back with wild grief from the silence into which her soul had fled.  And I knew then that she had put all thought of self aside in a sense of devotion to duty,—­she had chosen what she imagined to be the only way out of difficulty,—­ to save the honour of her lover she had slain herself.  But—­was it wise?  Or foolish?  This thought pressed itself insistently home to my mind.  She had given her life to serve a mistaken creed,—­she had bowed to the conventions of a temporary code of human law—­yet—­ surely God was above all strange and unnatural systems built up by man for his own immediate convenience, vanity or advantage, and was not Love the nearest thing to God?  And if those two souls were destined lovers, could they be divided, even by their own rashness?  These questions were curiously urged upon my inward consciousness as I looked again upon the poor fragile corpse among the reeds and palms of the sluggishly flowing river, and heard the clamorous despair of the man to whom she might have been joy, inspiration and victory had not the world been then as it is not now—­the man, who as the light of the moonbeams fell upon him, showed me in his haggard and miserable features the spectral likeness of Santoris.  Was it right, I asked myself, that the two perfect lines of a mutual love should be swept asunder?—­or if it was, as some might conceive it, right according to certain temporary and conventional views of ‘rightness.’ was it possible to so sever them?  Would it not be well if we all occasionally remembered that there is an eternal law of harmony between souls as between spheres?—­and that if we ourselves bring about a divergence we also bring about discord?  And again,—­ that if discord results by our inter-meddling, it is against the law, and must by the working of natural forces be resolved into concord again, whether such resolvance take ten, a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years?  Of what use, then, is the struggle we are for ever making in our narrow and limited daily lives to resist the wise and holy teaching of Nature?  Is it not best to yield to the insistence of the music of life while it sounds in our ears?  For everything must come round to Nature’s way in the end—­her way being God’s way, and God’s way the only way!  So I thought, as in half-dreaming fashion I watched the vision of the dead woman and her despairing lover fade into the impenetrable shadows of mystery veiling the record of the light beyond.