So it came about that the more Good bothered me to read this particular romance, the more I determined that I would do nothing of the sort.  Being a persistent person, however, when he went away about ten o’clock at night, he deposited it by my side, under my nose indeed, so that it might not be overlooked.  Thus it came about that I could not help seeing some Egyptian hieroglyphics in an oval on the cover, also the title, and underneath it your own name, my friend, all of which excited my curiosity, especially the title, which was brief and enigmatic, consisting indeed of one word, “She.”

I took up the work and on opening it the first thing my eye fell upon was a picture of a veiled woman, the sight of which made my heart stand still, so painfully did it remind me of a certain veiled woman whom once it had been my fortune to meet.  Glancing from it to the printed page one word seemed to leap at me.  It was Kor!  Now of veiled women there are plenty in the world, but were there also two Kors?

Then I turned to the beginning and began to read.  This happened in the autumn when the sun does not rise till about six, but it was broad daylight before I ceased from reading, or rather rushing through that book.

Oh! what was I to make of it?  For here in its pages (to say nothing of old Billali, who, by the way lied, probably to order, when he told Mr. Holly that no white man had visited his country for many generations, and those gloomy, man-eating Amahagger scoundrels) once again I found myself face to face with She-who-commands, now rendered as She-who-must-be-obeyed, which means much the same thing—­in her case at least; yes, with Ayesha the lovely, the mystic, the changeful and the imperious.

Moreover the history filled up many gaps in my own limited experiences of that enigmatical being who was half divine (though, I think, rather wicked or at any rate unmoral in her way) and yet all woman.  It is true that it showed her in lights very different from and higher than those in which she had presented herself to me.  Yet the substratum of her character was the same, or rather of her characters, for of these she seemed to have several in a single body, being, as she said of herself to me, “not One but Many and not Here but Everywhere.”

Further, I found the story of Kallikrates, which I had set down as a mere falsehood invented for my bewilderment, expanded and explained.  Or rather not explained, since, perhaps that she might deceive, to me she had spoken of this murdered Kallikrates without enthusiasm, as a handsome person to whom, because of an indiscretion of her youth, she was bound by destiny and whose return—­somewhat to her sorrow—­she must wait.  At least she did so at first, though in the end when she bared her heart at the moment of our farewell, she vowed she loved him only and was “appointed” to him “by a divine decree.”

Also I found other things of which I knew nothing, such as the Fire of Life with its fatal gift of indefinite existence, although I remember that like the giant Rezu whom Umslopogaas defeated, she did talk of a “Cup of Life” of which she had drunk, that might have been offered to my lips, had I been politic, bowed the knee and shown more faith in her and her supernatural pretensions.