upon the floor, with hands linked. They were
bowing forward and kissing the floor--which might account for the
strange sound heard by Gerard--and their faces were illuminated with a
light of hellish ecstasy--half distorted as if in pain, half smiling as
if in triumph. The Abbe's eyes instinctively sought out the Prince. He
was the last on the left hand side, and while his left hand grasped that
of his neighbor, his right was sweeping nervously over the floor as if
seeking to animate the boards. His face was more calm than those of the
others, but of a deadly pallor, and the violet tints about the mouth and
temples showed he was suffering from intense emotion. They were all,
each one after his own fashion, praying aloud, or rather moaning, as
they writhed in ecstatic adoration.

"Oh, Father of Evil, come to us!"

"Oh, Prince of Endless Desolation, who sitteth by the bed of suicides,
we adore thee!"

"Oh, creator of eternal anguish! oh, king of cruel pleasures and
famishing desires, we worship thee!"

"Come to us, with thy foot upon the hearts of widows, thy hair lucid
with the slaughter of innocence, and thy brow wreathed with the chaplet
of despair!"

The heart of the Abbe turned cold and sick as these beings, hardly human
by reason of their great mental exaltation, swayed before him.

Suddenly--or rather the full conception of the fact was sudden, for the
influence had been gradually stealing over him--he felt a terrible
coldness, a coldness more piercing than any he had before experienced
even in Russia; and with the coldness there came to him the certain
knowledge of the presence of some new being in the room. Withdrawing his
eyes from the semi-circle of men, who did not seem to be aware of his,
the Abbe's, presence, and who ceased not in their blasphemies, he
turned them slowly around, and as he did so they fell upon a newcomer, a
thirteenth, who seemed to spring into existence from the air before his
very eyes.

He was a young man of apparently twenty, very tall, with bright golden
hair falling from his forehead like a girl's. He was dressed in evening
dress, and his cheeks were flushed as if with wine or pleasure, but from
his eyes there gleamed a look of inexpressible sadness, of intense
despair. The group of men had evidently become aware of his presence at
the same moment, for they all fell prone upon the floor adoring, and
their words were now no longer words of invocation, but words of praise
and wor