At these quite innocent remarks she sprang to her feet in a rage that might truly be called royal in every sense.

“Impossible!  Romance!  Dreams!  Delusions!  Mad!” she cried in a ringing voice.  “Oh! of a truth you weary me, and I have a mind to send you whither you will learn what is impossible and what is not.  Indeed, I would do it, and now, only I need your services, and if I did there would be none left for me to talk with, since your companion is moonstruck and the others are but savages of whom I have seen enough.

“Hearken, fool! Nothing is impossible.  Why do you seek, you who talk of the impossible, to girdle the great world in the span of your two hands and to weigh the secrets of the Universe in the balance of your petty mind and, of that which you cannot understand, to say that it is not?  Life you admit because you see it all about you.  But that it should endure for two thousand years, which after all is but a second’s beat in the story of the earth, that to you is ‘impossible,’ although in truth the buried seed or the sealed-up toad can live as long.  Doubtless, also, you have some faith which promises you this same boon to all eternity, after the little change called Death.

“Nay, Allan, it is possible enough, like to many other things of which you do not dream to-day that will be common to the eyes of those who follow after you.  Mayhap you think it impossible that I should speak with and learn of you from yonder old black wizard who dwells in the country whence you came.  And yet whenever I will I do so in the night because he is in tune with me, and what I do shall be done by all men in the years unborn.  Yes, they shall talk together across the wide spaces of the earth, and the lover shall hear her lover’s voice although great seas roll between them.  Nor perchance will it stop at this; perchance in future time men shall hold converse with the denizens of the stars, and even with the dead who have passed into silence and the darkness.  Do you hear and understand me?”

“Yes, yes,” I answered feebly.

“You lie, as you are too prone to do.  You hear but you do not understand nor believe, and oh! you vex me sorely.  Now I had it in my mind to tell you the secret of this long life of mine; long, mark you, but not endless, for doubtless I must die and change and return again, like others, and even to show you how it may be won.  But you are not worthy in your faithlessness.”

“No, no, I am not worthy,” I answered, who at that moment did not feel the least desire to live two thousand years, perhaps with this woman as a neighbour, rating me from generation to generation.  Yet it is true, that now when I am older and a certain event cannot be postponed much longer, I do often regret that I neglected to take this unique chance, if in truth there was one, of prolonging an existence which after all has its consolations—­especially when one has made one’s pile.  Certainly it is a case, a flagrant case, of neglected opportunities, and my only consolation for having lost them is that this was due to the uprightness of my nature which made it so hard for me to acquiesce in alternative statements that I had every cause to disbelieve and thus to give offence to a very powerful and petulant if attractive lady.