onting the valley, the woman left her companion, passed by the litter
and the armed men, and paused by my side, at the mouth of the moonlit
cavern.

There for a moment she stood, silent, the procession below mounting
upward laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was
withdrawn.

The face on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful, and severely awful.
There was neither youth nor age, but beauty, mature and majestic as that
of a marble Demeter.

"Do you believe in that which you seek?" she asked, in her foreign,
melodious, melancholy accents.

"I have no belief," was my answer. "True science has none. True science
questions all things, takes nothing upon credit. It knows but three
states of the mind,--Denial, Conviction, and that vast interval between
the two, which is not belief, but suspense of judgment."

The woman let fall her veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a crag
above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I had first
discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain from the clouds
had given the rushing life of the cataract; but which now, in the
drought and the hush of the skies, was but a dead pile of stones.

The litter now ascended the height: its bearers halted; a lean hand tore
the curtains aside, and Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not on
the Black-veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.

There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his
face, resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite its hollowed outlines and
sicklied hues. He raised his head, spoke in the language unknown to me,
and the armed men and the litter-bearers grouped round him, bending low,
their eyes fixed on the ground. The Veiled Woman rose slowly and came to
his side, motioning away, with a mute sign, the ghastly form on which he
leaned, and passing round him silently, instead, her own sustaining arm.
Margrave spoke again a few sentences, of which I could not even guess
the meaning. When he had concluded, the armed men and the litter-bearers
came nearer to his feet, knelt down, and kissed his hand. They then
rose, and took from the bier-like vehicle the coffer and the fuel. This
done, they lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by the armed
men, the procession descended down the sloping hillside, down into the
valley below.

Margrave now whispered, for some moments, into the ear of the hideous
creature who had made way for the Veiled Woman. The grim sk