grasp the shadow, and she drew it to her in
her fancy and kissed its radiant face.

"To ages of ages!" she cried.

Then she covered her eyes as though to impress the sight they had seen
upon the mind within, and groping blindly for her chair sank back
into her seat. But the mechanical effort of will and memory could not
preserve the image. In spite of all inward concentration of thought,
its colours faded, its outlines trembled, grew faint and vanished, and
darkness was in its place. Unorna's hand dropped to her side, and a
quick throb of pain stabbed her through and through, agonising as the
wound of a blunt and jagged knife, though it was gone almost before she
knew where she had felt it. Then her eyes flashed with unlike fires, the
one dark and passionate as the light of a black diamond, the other keen
and daring as the gleam of blue steel in the sun.

"Ah, but I will!" she exclaimed. "And what I will--shall be."

As though she were satisfied with the promise thus made to herself, she
smiled, her eyelids drooped, the tension of her frame was relaxed, and
she sank again into the indolent attitude in which the Wanderer had
found her. A moment later the distant door turned softly upon its hinges
and a light footfall broke the stillness. There was no need for Unorna
to speak in order that the sound of her voice might guide the new comer
to her retreat. The footsteps approached swiftly and surely. A young man
of singular beauty came out of the green shadows and stood beside the
chair in the open space.

Unorna betrayed no surprise as she looked up into her visitor's face.
She knew it well. In form and feature the youth represented the noblest
type of the Jewish race. It was impossible to see him without thinking
of a young eagle of the mountains, eager, swift, sure, instinct with
elasticity, far-sighted and untiring, strong to grasp and to hold,
beautiful with the glossy and unruffled beauty of a plumage continually
smoothed in the sweep and the rush of high, bright air.

Israel Kafka stood still, gazing down upon the woman he loved, and
drawing his breath hard between his parted lips. His piercing eyes
devoured every detail of the sight before him, while the dark blood rose
in his lean olive cheek, and the veins of his temples swelled with the
beating of his quickened pulse.

"Well?"

The single indifferent word received the value of a longer speech from
the tone in which it was uttered, and from the look and ge