How the light flashed on its shimmering folds like the rippling phosphorescence on southern seas! ... as green and clear and brilliant as rays reflected from thousands and thousands of glistening emeralds! ...  And that haunting, sorrowful, weird music! ...  How it seemed to eat into his heart and there waken a bitter remorse combined with an equally bitter despair!

Once more the Veil moved, and this time it appeared to inflate itself in the fashion of a sail caught by a sudden breeze,—­then it began to part in the middle very slowly and without sound.  Further and further back on each side it gradually receded, and ... like a lily disclosed between folding leaves—­a Figure, white, wonderful and angelically fair, shone out, the centre jewel of the stately shrine,—­a shrine whose immense carven pillars, grotesque idols, bronze and gold ornaments, jewelled lamps and dazzling embroideries, only served as a sort of neutral-tinted background to intensify with a more lustrous charm the statuesque loveliness revealed!  O Lysia, UNvirgined Priestess of the Sun and Nagaya, how gloriously art thou arrayed in sin! ...  O singular Sweetness whose end must needs be destruction, was ever woman fairer than thou! ...  O love, love, lost in the dead Long-Ago, and drowned in the uttermost darkness of things evil, wilt thou drag my soul with thee again into everlasting night!

Thus Theos inwardly raved, without any real comprehension of his own thoughts, but only stricken anew by a feverish passion of mingled love and hatred as he stared on the witching sorceress whose marvellous beauty was such wonder and torture to his eyes, . . what mattered it to him that King, Laureate, and people had all prostrated themselves before her in reverent humility? ...  He knew her nature, . . he had fathomed her inborn wickedness, . . and though his senses were attracted by her, his spirit loathingly repelled her, . . he therefore remained seated stiffly upright, watching her with a sort of passive, immovable intentness.  As she now appeared before him, her loveliness was absolutely and ideally perfect,—­ she looked the embodiment of all grace,—­the model of all chastity.

She stood quite still, . . her hands folded on her breast, . . her head slightly lifted, her dark eyes upturned, . . her unbound black hair streamed over her shoulders in loose glossy waves, and above her brows her diadem of serpents’ heads sparkled like a coronal of flame.  Her robe was white, made of some silky shining stuff that glistened with soft pearly hues; it was gathered about her waist by a twisted golden girdle.  Her arms were bare, decked as before with the small jewelled snakes that coiled upward from wrist to shoulder,—­and when after a brief pause she unfolded her hands and raised them with a slow, majestic movement above her head, the great Symbolic Eye flared from her bosom like a darting coal, seeming to turn sinister glances on all sides as though on the search for some suspected foe.