and give me a
little of your kindness, a little of your forgiveness. I have so
little, so little of him. I know now that I have never even had
his respect, at times barely his tolerance. And, God help me, I
loved him so. Can you understand when I say that I love him even
the more that he was always greater than the manifold arts I
exercised upon him? That all my sacrifices, my tenderness, my
adoration gave him out apathetic amusement? I was ever but a toy to
divert him from the agony your neglect caused him and any other
woman as fair would have sufficed as well.

"To my shame be it said that I knew it all the time; but I was
hoping against hope. To-day I go away from here, and from him,
forever. He will come to you as certainly as the iron flies to the
magnet, and he will be suffering, penitent and purified. My share
of him has been the coarse dross of passion that must be skimmed
from the crucible of every strong man's hot heart; yours will be
the refined gold of his soul's first and last real love. For God's
sake, child, play with happiness no more, lest you lose it as I
have done.

"In the bitterness of the days to come it would lessen the pain if
I thought you could ever come to forgive me. I can see to write no
more. Mayhap these tears will in time wash out the stain on my
soul. That on my hands I must see forever. It is the visible proof
of my atonement, for by it I gave back his life to you."

The paper was wet with her tears as she thrust it into the bosom of her
dress. Beside the open window she knelt and prayed for the peace of a
troubled soul. But it could never be--this home-coming of her lost love.
Her heart, too, was dead; the feet of her idol had crumbled and the
glorious fabric of her dreams was dust. The yellow drifting sands of the
Libyan desert shimmering before her aching eyes were no more dry and
lifeless than the dead love moldering In her heart. Never again would
her pulses leap at the sound of his voice or her senses reel at his
touch. That was as much a thing of the past as Thebes, Luzor, Karnak and
Athor out yonder, a dead thing buried in the ashes of a murdered hope.

Over in the aridity of the eternal desert, where for ages she had
watched in contemptuous silence the petty tragedies enacted on the worn
old stage of Life by the gibbering puppets who call themselves Man, the
w