've no
objection."

She spoke firmly, seriously, as if she knew something against the Globe
Theater, as if the Globe Theater were disreputable or improper.

Then (it was wonderful how she contrived the little air of excited
inspiration), "Tell you what," she said, "let's go and sit down
somewhere and listen to the band. There's nothing I love so much as
listening to a band."

She knew that they charged nothing for listening to the band.

It was a prompting from the Exhibition itself, proving, here again, that
it was on her side, an entirely friendly and benignant power.

"All right," said Ranny. "_That's_ in the Western Garden."

He took her by the arm and drew her, not to the Western Garden, but to a
street (he seemed to know it by instinct) through which Shakespeare's
England, iniquitously, treacherously, led them to their doom, the Water
Chute.

For there the Exhibition threw off her mask and revealed herself as the
dangerous Enchantress that she was. Hung with millions of electric
bulbs, crowned and diademed, and laced with jewels of white flame, she
signaled to them out of the mystery and immensity of the night. For a
moment they were dumb, they stood still, as if they paused on the brink
and struggled, protesting against this ravishing of their souls by the
Exhibition. Straight in front of them, monstrous yet fragile, its
substance withdrawn into the darkness, its form outlined delicately in
beads of light, in brilliants, in crystals strung on invisible threads,
the Water Chute reared itself like a stairway to the sky, arch above
arch, peak above peak, diadem above diadem, tilted at a frightful pitch.
Chains of light, slung like garlands from tall standards, ringed the
long lake that stretched from their feet to the bottom of the stair. The
water, dark as the sky, showed mystic and enchanted, bordered with
trembling reeds of light.

From somewhere up in the sky, under the topmost diamonded arch, there
came a rumbling and a rushing--

It thrilled them, agitated them.

And their youth rose up in them. They looked at each other, and their
eyes, the eyes of their youth, shone with the same excitement and the
same desire.

She knew that he had deceived her, that this was not the Western Garden,
where the band played; she was aware that the Exhibition was not to be
trusted either; that it was in league with him against her; that if she
yielded to it they were lost. And yet she yielded. The deep and high
e