hat for two thousand years had
slumbered in the blood of her and her line. She stood, with mouth agape
and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour. The
other was the Dream now, and these!... they came down, mad and noisy
and bright--Maenades, Thyades, satyrs, fauns--naked, in hides of beasts,
ungirded, dishevelled, wreathed and garlanded, dancing, singing,
shouting. The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of
their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsi filled the air. They
brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats;
they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft.
Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seashore
with the red of the sunset behind them. She saw the evening light on the
sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs
and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red
mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping
fauns. And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep
ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who
slept with the serpents coiled about them.

Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with
libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped
thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anemonied pools of
the shore. They raced to the water, that gleamed pale as nacre in the
deepening twilight in the eye of the evening star. They ran along its
edge over their images in the wet sands, calling their lost companion.

"Hasten, hasten!" they cried; and one of them, a young man with a torso
noble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal
hills, ran here and there calling her name.

"Louder, louder!" she called back in an ecstasy.

Something dropped and tinkled against the fender. It was one of her
hairpins. One side of her hair was in a loose tumble; she threw up the
small head on the superb thick neck.

"Louder!--I cannot hear! Once more--"

The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair
had given her a glimpse of herself in the glass over the mantelpiece. For
the last time that formidable "Beware!" sounded like thunder in her ears;
the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was
cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders
was seeking her .