“Aye, the savage, who being Nature’s child, a sinner that departed hence by her own act” (how Ayesha knew this I cannot say, I never told her), “has not yet put on perfection and therefore still remembers him whose kiss was last upon her lips.  But surely, Allan, it is not thy desire to pass from the gentle, ordered claspings of those white souls for the tumultuous arms of such a one as this.  Still, let that be, for who knows what men will or will not do in jealousy and disappointed love?  And the dog, it remembered also and even sought thee out, since dogs are more faithful and single-hearted than is mankind.  There at least thou hast thy lesson, namely to grow more humble and never to think again that thou holdest all a woman’s soul for aye, because once she was kind to thee for a little while on earth.”

“Yes,” I answered, jumping up in a rage, “as you say, I have my lesson, and more of it than I want.  So by your leave, I will now bid you farewell, hoping that when it comes to be your turn to learn this lesson, or a worse, Ayesha, as I am sure it will one day, for something tells me so, you may enjoy it more than I have done.”

CHAPTER XXII

AYESHA’S FAREWELL

Thus I spoke whose nerves were on edge after all that I had seen or, as even then I suspected, seemed to see.  For how could I believe that these visions of mine had any higher origin than Ayesha’s rather malicious imagination?  Already I had formed my theory.

It was that she must be a hypnotist of power, who, after she had put a spell upon her subject, could project into his mind such fancies as she chose together with a selection of her own theories.  Only two points remained obscure.  The first was—­how did she get the necessary information about the private affairs of a humble individual like myself, for these were not known even to Zikali with whom she seemed to be in some kind of correspondence, or to Hans, at any rate in such completeness?

I could but presume that in some mysterious way she drew them from, or rather excited them in my own mind and memory, so that I seemed to see those with whom once I had been intimate, with modifications and in surroundings that her intelligence had carefully prepared.  It would not be difficult for a mind like hers familiar, as I gathered it was, with the ancient lore of the Greeks and the Egyptians, to create a kind of Hades and, by way of difference, to change it from one of shadow to one of intense illumination, and into it to plunge the consciousness of him upon whom she had laid her charm of sleep.  I had seen nothing and heard nothing that she might not thus have moulded, always given that she had access to the needful clay of facts which I alone could furnish.