oor of the dressing-room, where there stood a female Cerberus
whose business it was to keep away male intruders. When King Gunther,
after doing sentinel duty for half an hour, again caught sight of the
swan-maiden, the daughter of Father Rhine, she was so surpassingly
lovely that he forgot to inquire for her chaperone. The chaperone,
therefore, without difficulty, effected a clandestine retreat, found
her way to a carriage and drove home as fast as the spavined droschke
horse would convey her. Twenty minutes later she slipped into the
dressing-room at the Schuetzenhaus, accompanied by a second daughter of
Father Rhine, whom that worthy parent himself could scarcely have told
from her lately-arrived sister.

The three floors of the enormous house represented the upper, the
middle, and the lower world.

The first floor was submarine and subterranean; cool,
dimly-illuminated grottoes, some in basaltic, columnar rock, some in
emerald-glowing stalactite, invited all the fantastic creatures of the
sea, both fabled and real, who were promenading about on the floor of
the deep, to a sweet, life-long siesta in their softly-gleaming
recesses. On the second floor luxuriant equatorial palm-groves grew in
startling proximity to the snow-laden pines of the North, and a
heterogeneous assembly of all nations and ages poured through the
resplendent avenues, chatting and playing pranks on each other with
Teutonic good humor.

"Let us go to Olympus," said King Gunther, who was drifting with his
snow-maiden through the motley throng. "I may never have another
chance of getting there," he added jocosely.

"I am afraid I should not feel at home there," answered the daughter
of the Rhine; "you know I belong properly to the lower regions."

"Then let us go to the lower regions," retorted the king, gayly. "You
needn't go in search of the Elysian Fields; you carry them with you
wherever you go."

"Beware, your Majesty," murmured the water-nymph, threateningly. "You
are defying Fate. Creatures of my kind are dangerous to trifle with."

"It is you who are trifling, not I," he burst forth; "with me the joke
has long ago become serious."

He felt her arm trembling where it touched his; under the black fringe
of her mask he saw her lips quiver, and her eyes shone with a strange,
moist radiance. The crowd of gay maskers surged about them and the
music whirled away over their heads unheeded, and broke in showers of
rippling sound.

"Listen