n. Well, up to the present I was safe,
and for the rest I must take my chance. Moreover it was necessary to
be cautious, and, if need were, to feign ignorance. So, dismissing the
matter of my own fate from my mind, I fell to considering the scene
which I had witnessed and what might be its purport.

Was our quest at an end? Was this woman Ayesha? Leo had so dreamed, but
he was still delirious, therefore here was little on which to lean.
What seemed more to the point was that she herself evidently appeared to
think that there existed some tie between her and this sick man. Why
had she embraced him? I was sure that she could be no wanton, nor indeed
would any woman indulge for its own sake in such folly with a stranger
who hung between life and death. What she had done was done because
irresistible impulse, born of knowledge, or at least of memories, drove
her on, though mayhap the knowledge was imperfect and the memories were
undefined. Who save Ayesha could have known anything of Leo in the past?
None who lived upon the earth to-day.

And yet, why not, if what Kou-en the abbot and tens of millions of his
fellow-worshippers believed were true? If the souls of human beings were
in fact strictly limited in number, and became the tenants of an endless
succession of physical bodies which they change from time to time as we
change our worn-out garments, why should not others have known him? For
instance that daughter of the Pharaohs who "caused him through love to
break the vows that he had vowed" knew a certain Kallikrates, a priest
of "Isis whom the gods cherish and the demons obey;" even Amenartas, the
mistress of magic.

Oh! now a light seemed to break upon me, a wonderful light. What if
Amenartas and this Khania, this woman with royalty stamped on every
feature, should be the same? Would not that "magic of my own people
that I have" of which she wrote upon the Sherd, enable her to pierce the
darkness of the Past and recognize the priest whom she had bewitched to
love her, snatching him out of the very hand of the goddess? What if it
were not Ayesha, but Amenartas re-incarnate who ruled this hidden land
and once more sought to make the man she loved break through his vows?
If so, knowing the evil that must come, I shook even at its shadow. The
truth must be learned, but how?

Whilst I wondered the door opened, and the sardonic,
inscrutable-old-faced man, whom this Khania had called Magician, and who
called the Khania,