name, called me to the foot of the platform.

He held in his hand the golden sash and rose-coloured wand which
marked the rank about to be bestowed on me. I felt very deeply my own
incompetence and ignorance; and even had I valued more the proffered
honour, I should have been bound to decline it. But at the third word
I spoke, I was silenced with a stern though perfectly calm severity.
Flinging back the fold of his robe that covered his left arm, with a
gesture that placed the Signet full before my eyes, he said--

"You have sworn obedience."

A soldier's instinct or habit, the mesmeric command of Esmo's glance,
and the awe, due less to my own feeling than to the infectious
reverence of others, which the symbols and the oaths of the Order
extorted, left me no further will to resist. At the foot of the Throne
I received the investiture of my new rank; and as I rose and faced my
brethren, every hand was lifted to the lips, every head bent in
salutation of their new leader. Then, as I passed to the extreme place
on the right, they came forward to grasp my hand and utter a few words
of sympathy and kindness, in which a frank spirit of affectionate
comradeship, that reminded me forcibly of the mess-tent and the
bivouac fire, was mingled with the sense of a deeper and more sacred
tie.

Scarcely had we resumed our places than a startling incident gave a
new turn to the scene. Approaching the barrier, a woman, veiled, but
wearing the sash and star, knelt for a moment to the presence of the
Arch-Teacher, and then, as the barrier was thrown open by the
sentries, came up to the dais.

"She," said the new-comer, "has a message for you, Clavelta, for your
Council, and particularly for the last of its members."

"It is well," he answered.

The messenger took her seat among the Initiates, and Esmo dismissed
the assembly in the solemn form employed on the former occasion. Then,
followed by the twelve, and guided by the messenger (the gloved
fingers of whose left hand, as I observed, he very slightly touched
with his own right), he passed by another door out of the Hall, and
along one of the many passages of the subterrene Temple, into a
chamber resembling in every respect an apartment in an ordinary
residence. Here, with her veil, as is permitted only to maidenhood,
drawn back from her face, but covering almost entirely her neck and
bosom, and clad in the vestal white, reclined with eyes nearly closed
a young girl, in whose