inty, made common-sense seem out of place.
The whole black fog, the sea, the earth itself, seemed to be pressing
down his will! The longer he delayed, the weaker he grew.

A slight shifting of his position caused him all at once to encounter
the eyes of the unseen presence with his own! The stout-nerved young
fellow was startled to the very heart. Was the unseen presence
startled also? At all events, the shock found Balder Helwyse his
tongue, seldom before tied up without his consent.

"I hope I'm not disturbing your solitude. You are not a noisy
neighbor, sir."

So flat fell the words on the blank darkness, it seemed as if there
could never be a reply. Nevertheless, a reply came.

"You must come much nearer me than you are, to disturb my solitude. It
does not consist in being without a companion."

The quality of this voice of darkness was peculiar. It sounded old,
yet of an age that had not outlived the devil of youth. Probably the
invisibility of the speaker enhanced its effect. With most of the
elements of pleasing, it was nevertheless repulsive. It was soft,
fluent, polished, but savage license was not far off, hard held by a
slender leash; an underlying suggestion of harsh discordance. The
utterance, though somewhat rapid, was carefully distinct.

Helwyse had the gift of familiarity,--of that rare kind of familiarity
which does not degenerate into contempt. But there was an incongruity
about this person, hard to assimilate. In a couple of not very
original sentences, he had wrought upon his listener an effect of
depraved intellectual power, strangely combined with artless
simplicity,--an unspeakably distasteful conjunction! Imagination,
freed from the check of the senses, easily becomes grotesque; and
Helwyse, unable to see his companion, had no difficulty in picturing
him as a grisly monster, having a satanic head set upon the ingenuous
shoulders of a child. And what was Helwyse himself? No longer, surely,
the gravely humorous moralizer? The laws of harmony forbid! He is a
monster likewise; say--since grotesqueness is in vogue--the heart of
Lucifer burning beneath the cool brain of a Grecian sage. The
symbolism is not inapt, since Helwyse, while afflicted with pride and
ambition as abstract as boundless, had, at the same time, a logical,
fearless brain, and keen delight in beauty.

"I was just thinking," remarked the latter monster, "that this was a
good place for confidential conversation."

"You belie