THAT night Alan, with his heart too full even for the society of his own home, went out of the city a little before midnight and walked down towards the western shore of the lake, where there still stood the same grove of palms in which, more than a hundred and thirty years before, Natasha and Richard Arnold had plighted their despairing troth and under the shadow of what threatened to be an eternal separation spoken the first words of love that had ever passed their lips.

It was not altogether accident that guided his steps in this direction, for all day he had been reviewing the strange chain of events which united the fate of his ancestors with his own, and it was natural that the most romantic episode in their lives should inspire him with a desire to see the scene of it once more.

So it came about that he stood, on what he believed to be his last night in Aeria, beneath the self-same ancient palms which five generations before had heard Natasha confess her love for the man who had sworn to give her in exchange for it that empire of peace which he, their descendant, had been the means of losing.

The story was, of course, familiar to him in its minutest details, and as he stood there, his own heart heavy with a hopeless sorrow, he pictured his great ancestor standing on the[315] same spot, holding the means of universal conquest in his hands, and yet accounting all things as worthless because the empire within his grasp must lack the supreme crown of a woman’s love.

Then, looking back through the mists of the years that had gone by since then, he seemed to see the very shape of the Angel moving over the soft green sward where now the broad marble-paved roadway gleamed white beneath the trees, and to hear the musical murmur of her voice even as Richard Arnold had heard it on that eventful night.

“Alan!”

Was he dreaming, or was it the voice of his ancestress speaking to his soul in that hour of his lonely sorrow? A pale, shimmering, ghostly shape flitted across the quivering plumes of the palm-trees, dropped softly to the ground, and Alma stood before him in the well of her aerial boat.

Before his amazement had permitted him to utter a word she had stepped out and was coming towards him with outstretched hands, saying—

“They told me I should find you here. Alan, I have come to ask you to forgive me if you—before you go upon this mission of yours, if go you must.”

“To forgive you, Alma!” he exclaimed, recoiling a pace in sheer astonishment at her presence and her words. “What can I have to forgive you? Is it not rather”—

“No, Alan, it is not,” she said quickly, still holding out her hands to him and looking up at him with faintly flushed cheeks and shining eyes. “I see it all clearly now. Isma was right. It is I who have sinned against you, and it is for me to ask forgiveness.”

“How can you ask that of me, Alma? How have you harmed me?” he asked, still bewildered by her beauty and the enigmas that she spoke in, yet taking her hands, and, as if by instinct, drawing her towards him.

“I will answer that afterwards,” she said quickly, as though inspired by some sudden thought. “But tell me, first, are you quite resolved to go upon this mission?”

[316]

“Yes,” he said with an almost imperceptible quiver in his voice. “Have I not had a great, if not a guilty, share in bringing this curse upon the world, and is it not fitting that I should give my last days to the task, however hopeless, of bringing back peace on earth so that men may die sane and not mad?”

“But, Alan, is that a higher duty than you owe to your family and your people? You know that in you centre all their hopes for the future, if there is to be one. With you would die the name of Arnold, and the direct line of Natas and Natasha.............