A wind seemed to wake inside the house, blowing without sound or
impact; and a water began to rise that had no lap in its ripples,
no sob in its swell. It was cold, but it did not benumb. Unseen
and noiseless it came. It smote no sense in me, yet I knew it
rising. I saw it lift at last and float her. Gently it bore her,
unable to resist, and left rather than laid her on the settle. Then
it sank swiftly away.

The strife of thought, accusing and excusing, began afresh, and
gathered fierceness. The soul of Lilith lay naked to the torture
of pure interpenetrating inward light. She began to moan, and sigh
deep sighs, then murmur as holding colloquy with a dividual self:
her queendom was no longer whole; it was divided against itself.
One moment she would exult as over her worst enemy, and weep; the
next she would writhe as in the embrace of a friend whom her soul
hated, and laugh like a demon. At length she began what seemed a
tale about herself, in a language so strange, and in forms so
shadowy, that I could but here and there understand a little. Yet
the language seemed the primeval shape of one I knew well, and the
forms to belong to dreams which had once been mine, but refused to
be recalled. The tale appeared now and then to touch upon things
that Adam had read from the disparted manuscript, and often to make
allusion to influences and forces--vices too, I could not help
suspecting--with which I was unacquainted.

She ceased, and again came the horror in her hair, the sparkling
and flowing alternate. I sent a beseeching look to Mara.

"Those, alas, are not the tears of repentance!" she said. "The