ght and day, the dark light in her
eyes deepened, and the flush of a superb pride was on her brow--it
seemed Aspasia who lived again, and who remembered Pericles.

* * *

The chant of the Imaum rang up from the shore, deep and sonorous,
calling on the Faithful to prayer, an hour before midnight. She listened
dreamily to the echoes that seemed to linger among the dark foliage.

"I like those national calls to prayer," she said, as she leaned over
the parapet, while the fire-flies glittered among the mass of leaves as
the diamond sprays glistened in her hair. "The Ave Maria, the Vespers,
the Imaum's chant, the salutation of the dawn or of the night, the hymn
before sleep, or before the sun;--you have none of those in your chill
islands? You have only weary rituals, and stuccoed churches, where the
'Pharisees for a pretence make long prayers!' As if _that_ was not the
best--the only--temple!"

She glanced upward at the star-studded sky, and on her face was that
graver and gentler look which had come there when she sang.

"I have held it so many a time," he answered her, lying awake at night
among the long grass of the Andes, or under the palms of the desert. It
was a strange delusion to build shrines to the honour of God while there
are still his own--the forests and the mountains.

* * *

"It was a fair heritage to lose through a feeble vanity--that beautiful
Constantinople!" she said musingly. "The East and the West--what an
empire! More than Alexander ever grasped at--what might not have been
done with it? Asian faith and Oriental sublimity, with Roman power and
Gothic force; if there had been a hand strong enough to weld all these
together, what a world there might have been!"

"But to have done that would have been to attain the Impossible," he
answered her. "Oil and flame, old and new, living and dying, tradition
and scepticism, iconoclast and idolater, you cannot unite and harmonise
these antagonisms?"

She gave a sign of dissent.

"The prophet or the hero unites all antagonisms, because he binds them
all to his own genius. The Byzantine empire had none such; the nearest
was Julian, but he believed less in himself than in the gods; the
nearest after him was Belisarius--the fool of a courtesan, and he was
but a good soldier; he was no teacher, no liberator, no leader for the
nations. John Vatices came too late. A man must be his own convert
before he can convert other