and yet he is
not struck by fire from Heaven.' Thereupon we returned to the
drawing-room. I noticed that there was no mirror in the whole
apartment. I was going to remark upon this, but Erik had already sat
down to the piano. He said, 'You see, Christine, there is some music
that is so terrible that it consumes all those who approach it.
Fortunately, you have not come to that music yet, for you would lose
all your pretty coloring and nobody would know you when you returned to
Paris. Let us sing something from the Opera, Christine Daae.' He spoke
these last words as though he were flinging an insult at me."

"What did you do?"

"I had no time to think about the meaning he put into his words. We at
once began the duet in Othello and already the catastrophe was upon us.
I sang Desdemona with a despair, a terror which I had never displayed
before. As for him, his voice thundered forth his revengeful soul at
every note. Love, jealousy, hatred, burst out around us in harrowing
cries. Erik's black mask made me think of the natural mask of the Moor
of Venice. He was Othello himself. Suddenly, I felt a need to see
beneath the mask. I wanted to know the FACE of the voice, and, with a
movement which I was utterly unable to control, swiftly my fingers tore
away the mask. Oh, horror, horror, horror!"

Christine stopped, at the thought of the vision that had scared her,
while the echoes of the night, which had repeated the name of Erik, now
thrice moaned the cry:

"Horror! ... Horror! ... Horror!"

Raoul and Christine, clasping each other closely, raised their eyes to
the stars that shone in a clear and peaceful sky. Raoul said:

"Strange, Christine, that this calm, soft night should be so full of
plaintive sounds. One would think that it was sorrowing with us."

"When you know the secret, Raoul, your ears, like mine, will be full of
lamentations."

She took Raoul's protecting hands in hers and, with a long shiver,
continued:

"Yes, if I lived to be a hundred, I should always hear the superhuman
cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared
before my eyes ... Raoul, you have seen death's heads, when they have
been dried and withered by the centuries, and, perhaps, if you were not
the victim of a nightmare, you saw HIS death's head at Perros. And
then you saw Red Death stalking about at the last masked ball. But all
those death's heads were motionless and their dumb horror was not