ee.

It was almost too rapid for the eye to follow in its first stages--a
fever of movement--a delirium indescribable--a fantasy painful to watch,
but from which no watcher could turn away. Even Saltash, who had taken
small interest in the previous dance, leaned forward and gave his full
attention to this, as it were in spite of himself. The very horror of it
was magnetic. They seemed to look upon a death-struggle--the wild fight
of a creature endowed with a fiery vitality against an enemy unseen but
wholly ruthless and from the first invincible.

Those who saw that dance of Rozelle Daubeni never forgot it, and there
was hardly a woman in the audience who was not destined to shudder
whenever the memory of it arose. It was arresting, revolting, terrible;
it must have compelled in any case. A good many began to sob with the
sheer nervous horror of it, yearning for the end upon which they were
forced to look, though with a dread that made the blood run cold.

But the end was such as no one in that assembly looked for. Just as the
awful ecstasy of the dance was at its height, just as the dreaded crisis
approached, and they saw with a gasping horror the inevitable final
clutch of the unseen enemy upon his vanquished victim; just as she lifted
her face in the last anguish of supplication, yielding the last hope,
sinking in nerveless surrender before the implacable destroyer, there
came a sudden flare of light in the _salon_, and the great crystal
candelabra that hung over the end of the gallery where the man and the
girl were seated watching became a dazzling sparkle of overwhelming
light.

Everyone turned towards it instinctively, and Toby, hardly knowing what
she did, but with the instinct to escape strong upon her, leapt to her
feet.

In that moment--as she stood in the full light--the dancer's eyes also
shot upwards and saw the sum young figure. It was only for a moment, but
instantly a wild cry rang through the great _salon_--a cry of agony so
piercing that women shrieked and trembled, hiding their faces from what
they knew not what.

In the flash of a second the light was gone, the gallery again in
darkness. But on the stage a woman's voice cried thrice: "Toinette!
Toinette! Toinette!" in the anguished accents of a mother who cries for
her dead child, and then fell into a tragic silence more poignant than
any sound--a silence that was as the silence of Death.

And in that silence a man's figure, moving with the