ce. She
gasped for breath, and it was as if the earth spun under her feet. She
appeared to travel at an immeasurable speed. She made a slight movement,
and Haddo told her not to look round. An immense terror seized her. She
did not know whither she was borne, and still they went quickly, quickly;
and the hurricane itself would have lagged behind them. At last their
motion ceased; and Oliver was holding her arm.

'Don't be afraid,' he said. 'Open your eyes and stand up.'

The night had fallen; but it was not the comfortable night that soothes
the troubled minds of mortal men; it was a night that agitated the soul
mysteriously so that each nerve in the body tingled. There was a lurid
darkness which displayed and yet distorted the objects that surrounded
them. No moon shone in the sky, but small stars appeared to dance on the
heather, vague night-fires like spirits of the damned. They stood in a
vast and troubled waste, with huge stony boulders and leafless trees,
rugged and gnarled like tortured souls in pain. It was as if there had
been a devastating storm, and the country reposed after the flood of
rain and the tempestuous wind and the lightning. All things about them
appeared dumbly to suffer, like a man racked by torments who has not the
strength even to realize that his agony has ceased. Margaret heard the
flight of monstrous birds, and they seemed to whisper strange things
on their passage. Oliver took her hand. He led her steadily to a
cross-road, and she did not know if they walked amid rocks or tombs.

She heard the sound of a trumpet, and from all parts, strangely appearing
where before was nothing, a turbulent assembly surged about her. That
vast empty space was suddenly filled by shadowy forms, and they swept
along like the waves of the sea, crowding upon one another's heels. And
it seemed that all the mighty dead appeared before her; and she saw grim
tyrants, and painted courtesans, and Roman emperors in their purple, and
sultans of the East. All those fierce evil women of olden time passed by
her side, and now it was Mona Lisa and now the subtle daughter of
Herodias. And Jezebel looked out upon her from beneath her painted brows,
and Cleopatra turned away a wan, lewd face; and she saw the insatiable
mouth and the wanton eyes of Messalina, and Fustine was haggard with the
eternal fires of lust. She saw cardinals in their scarlet, and warriors
in their steel, gay gentlemen in periwigs, and ladies in powder an