“And now,” said Alwyn in conclusion,—­“I always try to remember for my own comfort that I left my dead Self in the burning ruin of that dream built city of the past,—­or seemed to leave it, . . and yet I feel sometimes as if its shadow presence clung to me still!  I look in the mirror and see strange, faint reflections of the actual personal attributes of the slain Sah-luma,—­occasionally these are so strong and distinctly marked that I turn away in anger from my own image!  Why, I loved that Phantasm of a Poet in my dream as I must for ages have loved myself to my own utter undoing!—­I admired his work with such extravagant fondness, that, thinking of it, I blush for shame at my own thus manifest conceit!—­In truth there is only one thing in that pictured character of his, I can for the present judge myself free from,—­ namely, the careless rejection of true love for false,—­the wanton misprisal of a faithful heart, such as Niphrata’s, whose fair child-face even now often flits before my remorseful memory,—­and the evil, sensual passion for a woman whose wickedness was as evident as her beauty was paramount!  I could never understand or explain this wilful, headstrong weakness in my Shadow-Self—­it was the one circumstance in my vision that seemed to have little to do with the positive Me in its application,—­but now I thoroughly grasp the meaning of the lesson conveyed, which is that no man ever really knows himself, or fathoms the depths of his own possible inconsistencies.  And as matters stand with me at the present time, I am hemmed in on all sides by difficulties,—­for since the modern success of that very anciently composed poem, ‘Nourhalma’”—­and he smiled—­“my friends and acquaintances are doing their best to make me think as much of myself as if I were, —­well! all that I am not.  Do what I will, I believe am still an egoist,—­nay, I am sure of it,—­for even as regards my heavenly saint, Edris, I am selfish!”

“How so?” asked Heliobas, with a grave side-glance of admiration at the thoughtful face and meditative earnest eyes of this poet, this once bitter and blasphemous skeptic, grown up now to a majesty of faith that not all the scorn of men or devils could ever shake again.

“I want her!”—­he replied, and there was a thrill of pathetic yearning in his voice—­“I long for her every moment of the day and night!  It seems, too, as if everything combined to encourage this craving in me,—­this fond, mad desire to draw her down from her own bright sphere of joy,—­down to my arms, my heart, my life!  See!”—­and he stopped by a bed of white hyacinths, nodding softly in the faint breeze—­“Even those flowers remind me of her!  When I look up at the blue sky I think of the radiance of her eyes,—­they were the heaven’s own color,—­when I see light clouds floating together half gray, half tinted by the sun, they seem to me to resemble the