would have puzzled me to carry for an hour: this was no burden to
impede a grown man.

In other ways too she had altered. The nails of her fingers had grown to
such a great length that they were twisted in spirals, and the fingers
themselves and her hands were so waxy and transparent that the bony core
upon which they were built showed itself beneath the flesh in plain dull
outline. Her clay-cold lips were so white, that one sighed to remember
the full beauty of their carmine. Her shoulders and neck had lost their
comely curves, and made bony hollows now in which the dust of entombment
lodged black and thickly.

Reverently I set about preparing those things which if all went well
should restore her. I heated water and filled a bath, and tinctured
it heavily with those essences of the life of beasts which the Priests
extract and store against times of urgent need and sickness. I laid her
chin-deep in this bath, and sat beside it to watch, maintaining that
bath at a constant blood heat.

An hour I watched; two hours I watched; three hours--and yet she showed
no flicker of life. The heat of her body given her by the bath, was the
same as the heat of my own. But in the feel of her skin when I stroked
it with my hand, there was something lacking still. Only when our Lord
the Sun rose for His day did I break off my watching, whilst I said the
necessary prayer which is prescribed, and quickly returned again to the
gloom of the house.

I was torn with anxiety, and as the time went on and still no sign of
life came back, the hope that had once been so high within me began to
sicken and leave me downcast and despondent. From without, came the
din of fighting. Already Phorenice had sent her troops to storm the
passageway, and the Priests who defended it were shattering them with
volleys of rocks. But these sounds of war woke no pulse within me. If
Nais did not wake, then the world for me was ended, and I had no spirit
left to care who remained uppermost. The Gods in Their due time will
doubtless smite me for this impiety. But I make a confession of it here
on these sheets, having no mind to conceal any portion of this history
for the small reason that it does me a personal discredit.

But as the hours went on, and still no flicker of life came to lessen
the dumb agony that racked me, I grew more venturesome, and added more
essences to the bath, and drugs also such as experience had shown might
wake the disused tissues into l