the first.  Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university.  Bridie!  Bridie Kelly!  He will never forget the name, ever remember the night:  first night, the bridenight.  They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant (Fiat!) light shall flood the world.  Did heart leap to heart?  Nay, fair reader.  In a breath ’twas done but—­hold!  Back!  It must not be!  In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk.  She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night.  She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day.  No, Leopold.  Name and memory solace thee not.  That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee—­and in vain.  No son of thy loins is by thee.  There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence:  silence that is the infinite of space:  and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of generations that have lived.  A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars.  She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal.  Twilight phantoms are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull.  They fade, sad phantoms:  all is gone.  Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa.  Netaim, the golden, is no more.  And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts.  Huuh!  Hark!  Huuh!  Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions.  Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, LACUS Mortis.  Ominous revengeful zodiacal host!  They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood.  And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven’s own magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo.  And lo, wonder of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the daystar, the bride, ever virgin.  It is she, Martha, thou lost one, Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant.  How serene does she now arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer.  It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.