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laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was withdrawn.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.

The litter now ascended the height: its bearers halted; a lean hand tore
the curtains aside, and Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not on the
Black-veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.

There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his face,