lanation what
I believe it to be--namely, that Ayesha, seeing further than we can
see, perceived the germ and smouldering spark of greatness which lay hid
within her lover's soul, and well knew that under the influence of her
gift of life, watered by her wisdom, and shone upon with the sunshine
of her presence, it would bloom like a flower and flash out like a star,
filling the world with light and fragrance?

Here also I am not able to answer, but must leave the reader to form his
own judgment on the facts before him, as detailed by Mr. Holly in the
following pages.

I

MY VISITOR

There are some events of which each circumstance and surrounding detail
seems to be graven on the memory in such fashion that we cannot forget
it, and so it is with the scene that I am about to describe. It rises
as clearly before my mind at this moment as though it had happened but
yesterday.

It was in this very month something over twenty years ago that I, Ludwig
Horace Holly, was sitting one night in my rooms at Cambridge, grinding
away at some mathematical work, I forget what. I was to go up for my
fellowship within a week, and was expected by my tutor and my college
generally to distinguish myself. At last, wearied out, I flung my book
down, and, going to the mantelpiece, took down a pipe and filled it.
There was a candle burning on the mantelpiece, and a long, narrow glass
at the back of it; and as I was in the act of lighting the pipe I caught
sight of my own countenance in the glass, and paused to reflect. The
lighted match burnt away till it scorched my fingers, forcing me to drop
it; but still I stood and stared at myself in the glass, and reflected.

"Well," I said aloud, at last, "it is to be hoped that I shall be able
to do something with the inside of my head, for I shall certainly never
do anything by the help of the outside."

This remark will doubtless strike anybody who reads it as being slightly
obscure, but I was in reality alluding to my physical deficiencies.
Most men of twenty-two are endowed at any rate with some share of the
comeliness of youth, but to me even this was denied. Short, thick-set,
and deep-chested almost to deformity, with long sinewy arms, heavy
features, deep-set grey eyes, a low brow half overgrown with a mop of
thick black hair, like a deserted clearing on which the forest had once
more begun to encroach; such was my appearance nearly a quarter of a
century ago, and such, with some mod