ler's
dreadful stamp; the lips were bloodless; the eyes were wide, lucent,
something like pale, phosphorescence gleaming within them--and
soulless.

He stared straight up at me, unwinking, unrecognizing. Pressing
against his side was a woman, young and gentle, and lovely--lovely
even through the mask that lay upon her face. And her wide eyes, like
Throckmartin's, glowed with the lurking, unholy fires. She pressed
against him closely; though the hordes kept up the faint churning,
these two kept ever together, as though bound by unseen fetters.

And I knew the girl for Edith, his wife, who in vain effort to save
him had cast herself into the Dweller's embrace!

"Throckmartin!" I cried. "Throckmartin! I'm here!"

Did he hear? I know now, of course, he could not.

But then I waited--hope striving to break through the nightmare hands
that gripped my heart.

Their wide eyes never left me. There was another movement about them,
others pushed past them; they drifted back, swaying, eddying--and
still staring were lost in the awful throng.

Vainly I strained my gaze to find them again, to force some sign of
recognition, some awakening of the clean life we know. But they were
gone. Try as I would I could not see them--nor Stanton and the
northern woman named Thora who had been the first of that tragic party
to be taken by the Dweller.

"Throckmartin!" I cried again, despairingly. My tears blinded me.

I felt Lakla's light touch.

"Steady," she commanded, pitifully. "Steady, Goodwin. You cannot help
them--now! Steady and--watch!"

Below us the Shining One had paused--spiralling, swirling, vibrant
with all its transcendent, devilish beauty; had paused and was
contemplating us. Now I could see clearly that nucleus, that core shot
through with flashing veins of radiance, that ever-shifting shape of
glory through the shroudings of shimmering, misty plumes, throbbing
lacy opalescences, vaporous spirallings of prismatic phantom fires.
Steady over it hung the seven little moons of amethyst, of saffron, of
emerald and azure and silver, of rose of life and moon white. They
poised themselves like a diadem--calm, serene, immobile--and down
from them into the Dweller, piercing plumes and swirls and spirals,
ran countless tiny strands, radiations, finer than the finest spun
thread of spider's web, gleaming filaments through which seemed to
run--_power_--from the seven globes; like--yes, that was it--miniatures
of the seven