st away. The child is sent to England. The circle is drawn.
The names are traced and the lamps filled. Tonight I make the last
essay. There remains untried one mighty spell. This Mystery----'"

A clap of thunder right over the house overwhelmed the reader's voice.
Phillida screamed as a violent wind volleyed through the place with a
crashing of doors and shutters, upstairs and down. The diary was ripped
from beneath Vere's hand and hurled straight to the center of that nest
of fire formed by the settling of the logs. A long tongue of flame
leaped high in the chimney as the spread leaves of the book caught and
flared, fanned by wind and draft. Vere sprang up, but Phillida's
clinging arms delayed him. When he reached the fire-tongs there was
nothing to rescue except a charring mass half-way toward ashes.

He turned toward me, perhaps at last surprised by my immobility.

"I am sorry, Mr. Locke," he apologized.

Desire had started up with the others when the sudden uproar of the
storm burst upon them. Now she cried out, breaking Vere's excuse of the
loss. Her small face blanched, she ran a few steps toward me.

"It has come! He will die--he is dying. Look, look!"

CHAPTER XX

"Behold! Where are their abodes?
Their places are not, even as though they had not been."
--TOMB OF KING ENTEF.

Desire Michell was beside me, and I could not rise or answer her. She
bent over me, so that the Rose of Jerusalem fragrance inundated me and
drove back the sickening air that was the breath of our enemy.

"Let me go," she sobbed, her head beside my head. "If you can hear me,
listen and leave me as It wills. You know now that I belong to It by
heritage? You know why we can never be together as you planned? Try to
feel horror of me. Put me away from you. No evil can come to me unless I
seek evil. But It will not suffer you to take me. Live, dear Roger, and
let me go."

"Yield to me, Man, what you may not keep," the whisper of the Thing
followed after her voice. "Would you take the witch-child to your
hearth? Cast her off; and taste my pardon."

"Can you hear, Roger? Roger, let me go."

With an effort terrible to make as death to meet, I broke from the
paralysis that chained me. As from the drag of a whirlpool, I tore
myself from the tide-clutch, from the will of the Thing, from the numb
weakness upon me. For a moment I thrust back the hand at my throat. I
stood up and drew De