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LILITH |
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of reddish lines, but when I would have examined them, they were gone.
All at once, a radiant form stood in the centre of the darkness, flashing a splendour on every side. Over a robe of soft white, her hair streamed in a cataract, black as the marble on which it fell. Her eyes were a luminous blackness; her arms and feet like warm ivory. She greeted me with the innocent smile of a girl—and in face, figure, and motion seemed but now to have stepped over the threshold of womanhood. ' Alas,' thought I,' ill did I reckon my danger! Can this be the woman I rescued—she who struck me, scorned me, left me ? I stood gazing at her out of the darkness; she stood gazing into it, as if searching for me.
She disappeared. ' She will not acknowledge me !' I thought. But the next instant her eyes flashed out of the dark straight into mine. She had descried me and.come to me !
' You have found me at last!' she said, laying her hand on my shoulder. ' I knew you would !'
My frame quivered with conflicting consciousnesses, to analyse which I had no power. I was simultaneously attracted and repelled : each sensation seemed either.
' You shiver!' she said. ' This place is cold for you! Come.'
I stood silent: she had struck me dumb with beauty; she held me dumb with sweetness.
Taking me by the hand, she drew me to the spot of light, and again flashed upon me. An instant she stood there.
' You have grown brown since last I saw you,' she said. |
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