“Give me your hand, fellow laborer!” said Margrave, joyfully.  “Ah, there is no faltering terror in this pulse!  I was not mistaken in the man.  What rests, but the place and the hour?—­I shall live, I shall live!”

III

Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the black curtains round him.  I walked on, as the guide, some yards in advance.  The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the Australasian sirocco.

We passed through the meadow lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in the mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven among her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendor upon the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below—­gold, the dumb symbol of organized Matter’s great mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good, bane and blessing.

Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the white-robed, skeletonlike image that had crept to my side unawares with its noiseless step.  Thus, in each winding turn of the difficult path at which the convoy following behind me came into sight, I had seen, first, the two gayly dressed, armed men, next the black, bierlike litter, and last the Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.

But now, as I halted on the tableland, backed by the mountain and fronting 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she stood, silent, the procession below mounting upward laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was withdrawn.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.