s, when you are cloyed
with unearthly virtue and perfection, remember that a _woman_ loved
you. There, I have made you quite a speech; you will always think of
me in connection with fine words. Why don't you go?"

Arthur stood utterly confused.

"And what will you do, Mildred?"

"I!" she answered, with the same hard laugh. "Oh, don't trouble
yourself about me. I shall be a happy woman yet. I mean to see life
now--go in for pleasure, power, ritualism, whatever comes first.
Perhaps, when we meet again, I shall be Lady Minster, or some other
great lady, and shall be able to tell you that I am very, very happy.
A woman always likes to tell her old lover that, you know, though she
would not like him to believe it. Perhaps, too"--and here her eyes
grew soft, and her voice broke into a sob--"I shall have a consolation
you know nothing of."

He did not know what she meant; indeed, he was half-distracted with
grief and doubt.

For a moment more they stood facing each other in silence, and then
suddenly she flung her arms above her head, and uttering a low cry of
grief, turned, and ran swiftly down the stone passage into the museum.
Arthur hesitated for a while, and then followed her.

A painful sight awaited him in that silent chamber; for there--
stretched on the ground before the statue of Osiris, like some
hopeless sinner before an inexorable justice, with her brown hair
touched to gold by a ray of sunlight from the roof--lay Mildred, as
still as though she were dead. He went to her, and tried to raise her,
but she wrenched herself loose, and, in an abandonment of misery,
flung herself upon the ground again.

"I thought it was over," she said, "and that you were gone. Go, dear,
or this will drive me mad. Perhaps, sometimes, you will write me."

He knelt beside her and kissed her, and then he rose and went.

But for many a year was he haunted by that scene of human misery
enacted in the weird chamber of the dead. Never could he forget the
sight of Mildred lying in the sunlight, with the marble face of
mocking calm looking down upon her, and the mortal frames of those
who, in their day, had suffered as she suffered, and ages since had
found the rest that she in time would reach, scattered all around--fit
emblems of the fragile vanity of passions which suck their strength
from earth alone.

CHAPTER LXXV

When Arthur got out of the gates of the Quinta Carr, he hurried to the
hotel,