h which she had glided like
some tremulous Lamia. Decidedly his imagination had carried him far. He
cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....

Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort.
Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the
tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet's beard had deceived him.
Impostors! But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating
power! For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense
of cerebral exaltation. If he could have met Debora again, he would have
forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father's chicanery. And how did
they spin their web? Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of
metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic. But
the machinery--the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic
dancing! No, he rejected the theory. Music is sometimes hypnotic, but
not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and
Debora's miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured
his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious
frescoes of time and space?

In the iron solitude of his soul he tortured himself with these
questions. His stupor lasted for days--was it the abrupt fall or was it
the result of his absinthe-like dreams? He was haunted by an odour that
assailed his brain like one tune persistently played. The odour! Whence
did it come with its sickly sweetness? Perhaps therein lay the secret of
his hallucinating visions. Perhaps a drug had perverted his brain. But
within the week the dangerous perfume had become dissipated, and with it
vanished all hope of solving the riddle. Oh, to sense once more the
enchantments of its fragrance, once more revel in the sublimated
intoxication of mighty forces weaving at the loom of life! By the
cadences of what infernal art had he been vouchsafed a glimpse of the
profiles of the gods? Henceforth Ferval became a lover of shadows.

XIX

NADA

The tenderness of the growing night disquieted the dying woman.

"Aline!" she called. But it was only the name that reverberated within
the walls of her brain, harrowed by fever. A soft air rustled the drawn
curtains of lawn; and on the dressing table the two little lamps
fluttered in syncopated sympathy. One picture the room held. It was
after a painting by Goya, and depicted a sneering skeleton scrawling on
his dusty tomb, with a