mouth. Often weariness and despair drive her to the brief
intoxication of the anodyne of adultery, a further crime which is only
the natural consequence of the first.

But it must not be thought that women are the only sexual criminals.
There are male as well as female prostitutes made respectable by
convention, and the debt-burdened man of title who marries to get gold
to re-gild his tarnished coronet is the worst of these; for too often he
drags an innocent but ignorant maiden down to his own vile level. Yet
the chief criminal of all is not the individual, but the Society which
not only encourages, but too often compels the crime. For this it also
pays the penalty. The collective crime brings the collective curse,
for, if human history proves anything, it proves that the Society which
persistently denies the Law of Selection, and continually defiles the
Altar of Love, in the end goes down through a foul welter of lust and
greed and gluttony into the nethermost Pit of Destruction.

Nitocris had not learned this yet. It was not within the plan of Eternal
Justice that her virgin soul, purified by the strenuous labour of many
lives towards the Light, should yet be darkened by the shadow of such
grim knowledge as this. It was enough for her now that she should be the
ministering angel of Love and Light.

But at the same moment, standing on that smooth, shady lawn, there were
also two incarnations of the destroying angels of Hate and Darkness, for
even here, amidst this pleasant scene of seemingly innocent pleasure and
laughter, the Eternal Conflict was being continued, as it is and must
be, wherever man comes in contact with his kith and kind.

Soon after Nitocris and Brenda had joined the group, Phadrig approached
the Prince, who happened for the moment to be standing alone at the
bottom of the lawn, and said softly in Russian:

"Highness, my dream, as you are pleased to call it, has proved true.
That is the Queen--she who was once the daughter of the great Rameses,
Lady of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms."

"What?" laughed the Prince. "Miss Marmion, that lovely English girl,
your old Egyptian Mummy re-vivified! Well, have it as you like. You are
welcome to your dreams as long as you use your arts to help me to lay
hands on the beautiful reality. I have seen many a fair woman, and
thought myself in love with some of them, but by the beard of Ivan, I
have never seen one like this. I tell you, Phadrig, that the moment my