there we shall have ample time to urge our rival claims upon thy favor!  Ah!".. and he suddenly laid his two strong hands on her white uncovered shoulders, and gazed at her reproachfully as she shrank a little beneath his close scrutiny, . .  “Thou divine Traitress!  Have I not challenged the very heavens for thy sake? ... and lo! the prophecy is fulfilled and Al-Kyris must fall!  How many men would have loved thee as I have loved? ...  None! not even this dead Sah-luma, slain like a dog to give thee pleasure!  Come! ...  Let me kiss thee once again ere death makes cold our lips!  False or true, thou art nevertheless fair!—­and the wrathful gods know best how I worship thy fairness!”

And folding his arms about her, he kissed her passionately.  She clung to him like a lithe serpentine thing,—­her eyes ablaze, her mouth quivering with suppressed hysterical laughter.  Pointing to Sah-luma’s body, she said in a strange excited whisper: 

“Nay, hast thou slain him in very truth, Zephoranim! ... slain him utterly?  For I have heard that poets cannot die,—­they live when the whole world deems them dead,—­they rise from their shut graves and re-invest the earth with all the secrets of past time, . .  Oh! my brain reels! ...  I talk mere madness! ... there is no afterwards of death!—­No, no!  No gods, no anything but blankness.. forgetfulness.. and silence! ... for us, and for all men! ...  How good it is!—­how excellently devised a jest! ... that the whole wide Universe should be but a cheat of time! ... a bubble blown into Space, to float, break, and perish,—­all for the idle sport of some unknown and shapeless Devil-Mystery!”

Shuddering, half-laughing, half-weeping, she clasped her hands round the monarch’s throat, and hid her wild eyes in his breast, while he, unnerved by her distraction and his own inward torture, glared about him on all sides for some glimmering chance of rescue, but could see none.  The flames were now attacking the Shrine on every side like a besieging army,—­their leaping darts of blue and crimson gleaming here and there with indescribable velocity, . . and still Theos knelt by Sah-luma’s corpse in dry-eyed despair, endeavoring with feverish zeal to stanch the oozing blood with a strip torn from his own garments, and listening anxiously for the feeblest heart-throb, or smaller pulsation of smouldering life in the senseless stiffening clay.

All at once a hideous scream assailed his ears,—­another, and yet another rang above the crackling roar of the gradually conquering fire, . . and half-lifting Sah-luma’s body in his arms, he looked up...O horror, horror! his nerves contracted,—­his blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins, . . his head swam giddily, . . and he thought the moment of his own death had come, for surely no man could behold the sight he saw and yet continue to live on!  Lysia the captor was made captive at last! ..bound, helpless, imprisoned, and hopelessly doomed, ..Nagaya had claimed his own!