drop away from her. She hopped for joy and laughed--she had been
needlessly alarmed. How could a fat, immobile spider squatting on a
flower be dangerous to a creature with wings? This part of her dance was
so graceful, so full of droll, bubbling, childlike merriment, that the
audience laughed tears of delight.

Now, however, a new phase of the dance began, introduced in a thoughtful
strain. Having danced herself to satiety and intoxicated herself with the
flower's perfume, Mara, with movements of agreeable fatigue, made as if
to lay herself to rest, but delayed here and there to brush from her body
something like the threads of a spider's web, at first serenely and
pensively, then with growing disquiet, which communicated itself to the
onlookers. The child paused, reflected an instant, and apparently was
about to laugh at herself because of the fears that had arisen in her
soul; but the next minute she paled with fright, and made a dexterous
leap, as if to free herself from a trap. Her blond hair tossed back in
Maenadic waves turned into a flaming stream. Her whole appearance evoked
involuntary cries of admiration.

The flight began. And now the theme of the dance was Mara's entanglement
in the threads the spider wove about her, which gradually choked her to
death. No dancer has ever executed such an idea with equal skill and
fidelity.

The little creature freed her foot from the meshes, only to find her neck
entwined; she clutched at the threads about her throat, only to find her
hands entangled; she tore at the cobweb, she bent her body, she slipped
away; she beat with her fists, she raged, and only enmeshed herself the
more tightly in the horrible skein; finally she lay fast bound. During
this last phase of the dance, her artist audience stood there rigid,
breathless, suffocating with a sense of horror.

It was not until nearly the end that Frederick von Kammacher felt that
his fate was forever linked with this girl. The feeling grew stronger
during the few moments that remained before the conclusion of the
performance. The poison of infatuation came from the expression of her
face. He noted precisely how it forced its way into him and how his whole
being suddenly grew sick. When little Ingigerd Hahlstroem once more opened
her eyes with a look of abysmal dismay, and fastened them in helpless
inquiry upon the spider, calmly drinking her blood away, an inner voice
seemed to command Frederick to become her compassio