Arthur stood utterly confused.
“And what will you do, Mildred?”
“I!” she answered, with the same hard laugh. “Oh, don’t trouble yourself about me. I shall be a happy woman yet. I mean to see life now—go in for pleasure, power, ritualism, whatever comes first. Perhaps, when we meet again, I shall be Lady Minster, or some other great lady, and shall be able to tell you that I am very, very happy. A woman always likes to tell her old lover that, you know, though she would not like him to believe it. Perhaps, too”—and here her eyes grew soft, and her voice broke into a sob—“I shall have a consolation you know nothing of.”
He did not know what she meant; indeed, he was half-distracted with grief and doubt.
For a moment more they stood facing each other in silence, and then suddenly she flung her arms above her head, and uttering a low cry of grief, turned, and ran swiftly down the stone passage into the museum. Arthur hesitated for a while, and then followed her.
A painful sight awaited him in that silent chamber; for there— stretched on the ground before the statue of Osiris, like some hopeless sinner before an inexorable justice, with her brown hair touched to gold by a ray of sunlight from the roof—lay Mildred, as still as though she were dead. He went to her, and tried to raise her, but she wrenched herself loose, and, in an abandonment of misery, flung herself upon the ground again.
“I thought it was over,” she said, “and that you were gone. Go, dear, or this will drive me mad. Perhaps, sometimes, you will write me.”
He knelt beside her and kissed her, and then he rose and went.
But for many a year was he haunted by that scene of human misery enacted in the weird chamber of the dead. Never could he forget the sight of Mildred lying in the sunlight, with the marble face of mocking calm looking down upon her, and the mortal frames of those who, in their day, had suffered as she suffered, and ages since had found the rest that she in time would reach, scattered all around—fit emblems of the fragile vanity of passions which suck their strength from earth alone.