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was withdrawn.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