our, his deadly stillness, his playful
familiarity with his dangerous captives, his mesmeric anger when they
were sullen and recalcitrant, his relapse into the savage churchwarden
with the collecting box when his "show" was at an end,--every side,
every subtlety of such a creature Claire could give with the certainty
of genius. As you watched her, you beheld the snakes, you beheld their
master. Even at the end you almost saw the vast and trackless desert
open its haggard arms to receive its child, who passed from the crowd to
the silence in which alone he could learn to fascinate the crowd. At the
great morning performance in London, a prince who knew the East had said
to Claire, "Miss Duvigne, you must have lived with snake-charmers. You
must have studied them for months."

"I never saw one in my life," she answered truthfully.

And now she gave her performance to those who, in the dingy market
squares of their white-walled cities, had seen the snakes dance and had
heard the prayer to Sidi Mahomet. And they squatted in the moonbeams,
immobile as goblins carved in dusky oak. Yet they inspired Claire. From
his hiding place Renfrew could note this. She had let her genius loose
upon them, as she had let her cloud of hair loose upon her shoulders.
The frosty touch of smart conventionality bewilders and half paralyses
the utterly unconventional. Often Renfrew had heard Claire curse the
smiling and self-contented Londoners who thronged the stalls of her
theatre. She felt, with the swiftness of genius, the retarding hand they
laid upon her winged talents. She had no inclination to curse these
hooded figures gathered round her in the night, staring upon her with
the fixed concentration of children who behold, rather than hear, a
fairy tale, they paid her the fine compliment of an undivided attention.
It was a curious scene and one that stirred in Renfrew a deep
excitement. He watched it with a double sense, of living keenly and of
dreaming deeply. Claire gave to him the first sense, the moon and the
motionless Moors the second. But presently one of the hooded statues
stirred and swayed, and there mingled with the voice of Claire a twisted
melody, so thin and wandering that it was like a thread binding a bundle
of gold. It pierced the night, and enclosed the words of the reciter,
one sound prisoned by another lighter and less than itself. The dogs had
ceased to bark now, and only the voice that told of the snake-charmer's
journ