My later studies in the occult science of Eastern schools had not furnished me with any antidote in which I believed on Earth, and if they had, it was not here available.
Despair rather than hope suggested an appeal to those which the analogous secrets of the Starlight might afford.

Anxiety, agitation, personal interest so powerful as now disturbed me, are generally fatal to the exercise of the powers recently placed at my command; so recently that, but for Terrestrial experience, I should hardly have known how to use them.

But the arts which assist in and facilitate that tremendous all-absorbing concentration of will on which the exertion of those powers depends, are far more fully developed in the Zveltic science than in its Earthly analogues.

A desperate effort, aided by those arts, at last controlled my thoughts, and turned them from the sick-room to that distant chamber in which I had so lately stood.
* * * * * I seemed to stand beside her, and at once to be aware that my thought was visible to the closed eyes.

From lips paler than ever, words--so generally resembling those I had previously heard that some readers may think them the mere recollection thereof--appeared to reach my sense or my mind as from a great distance, spoken in a tone of mingled pity, promise, and reproof:-- "What is youth or sex or beauty in the All-Commander's sight?
For the arm that smote and spared not, shall His wisdom spare to smite?
Yet, love redeems the loving; yet in thy need avail The Soul whose light surrounds thee, the faith that will not fail.
Thy lips shall soothe the terror, call to yon couch afar The solace of the Serpent, the shadow of the Star! Strength shall sustain the strengthless, nor the soft hand loose its grasp Of the hand it trusts and clings to--till another meet its clasp....
-- Steel-hard to man's last anguish, wax-soft to woman's mood!-- Death quits not the death-dealer; blood haunts the life of blood!" * * * * * Returning to the peristyle, I encountered Eveena, who had been seeking me anxiously.