avens! how beautiful she was! That flash of loveliness when out of
pique or coquetry she lifted her veil, blinded like the lightning. But
thank goodness, also like the lightning it frightened; instinctively one
felt that it was very dangerous, even to death, and with it I for one
wished no closer acquaintance. Fire may be lovely and attractive, also
comforting at a proper distance, but he who sits on the top of it is
cremated, as many a moth has found.

So I argued, knowing well enough all the while that if this particular
human--or inhuman--fire desired to make an holocaust of me, it could do
so easily enough, and that in reality I owed my safety so far to a lack
of that desire on its part. The glorious Ayesha saw nothing to attract
her in an insignificant and withered hunter, or at any rate in his
exterior, though with his mind she might find some small affinity.
Moreover to make a fool of him just for the fun of it would not
serve her purpose, since she needed his assistance in a business that
necessitated clear wits and unprejudiced judgment.

Lastly she had declared herself to be absorbed in some tiresome
complication with another man, of which it was rather difficult to
follow the details. It is true that she described him as a handsome but
somewhat empty-headed person whom she had last seen two thousand years
ago, but probably this only meant that she thought poorly of him because
he had preferred some other woman to herself, while the two thousand
years were added to the tale to give it atmosphere.

The worst of scandals becomes romantic and even respectable in two
thousand years; witness that of Cleopatra with Caesar, Mark Antony and
other gentlemen. The most virtuous read of Cleopatra with sympathy, even
in boarding-schools, and it is felt that were she by some miracle to be
blotted out of the book of history, the loss would be enormous. The same
applied to Helen, Phryne, and other bad lots. In fact now that one comes
to think of it, most of the attractive personages in history, male or
female, especially the latter, were bad lots. When we find someone to
whose name is added "the good" we skip. No doubt Ayesha, being very
clever, appreciated this regrettable truth, and therefore moved her
murky entanglements of the past decade or so back for a couple of
thousand years, as many of us would like to do.

There remained the very curious circumstance of her apparent
correspondence with old Zikali who lived far a