trate chairs, encouraged himself with
a scream of triumph, and leaped rapidly over chair after chair on his
hands--his limbless body now thrown back from the shoulders, and now
thrown forward to keep the balance--in a manner at once wonderful and
horrible to behold. "Dexter's Leap-frog!" he cried, cheerfully, perching
himself with his birdlike lightness on the last of the prostrate chairs
when he had reached the further end of the room. "I'm pretty active,
Mrs. Valeria, considering I'm a cripple. Let us drink to the hanging of
Mrs. Beauly in another bottle of Burgundy!"

I seized desperately on the first excuse that occurred to me for getting
away from him.

"You forget," I said--"I must go at once to the Major. If I don't warn
him in time, he may speak of me to Lady Clarinda by the wrong name."

Ideas of hurry and movement were just the ideas to take his fancy in his
present state. He blew furiously on the whistle that summoned Ariel from
the kitchen regions, and danced up and down on his hands in the full
frenzy of his delight.

"Ariel shall get you a cab!" he cried. "Drive at a gallop to the
Major's. Set the trap for her without losing a moment. Oh, what a day of
days this has been! Oh, what a relief to get rid of my dreadful secret,
and share it with You! I am suffocating with happiness--I am like
the Spirit of the Earth in Shelley's poem." He broke out with the
magnificent lines in "Prometheus Unbound," in which the Earth feels
the Spirit of Love, and bursts into speech. "'The joy, the triumph, the
delight, the madness! the boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness!
the vaporous exultation not to be confined! Ha! ha! the animation of
delight, which wraps me like an atmosphere of light, and bears me as a
cloud is borne by its own wind.' That's how I feel, Valeria!--that's how
I feel!"

I crossed the threshold while he was still speaking. The last I saw of
him he was pouring out that glorious flood of words--his deformed body,
poised on the overthrown chair, his face lifted in rapture to some
fantastic heaven of his own making. I slipped out softly into the
antechamber. Even as I crossed the room, he changed once more. I heard
his ringing cry; I heard the soft thump-thump of his hands on the floor.
He was going down the room again, in "Dexter's Leap-frog," flying over
the prostrate chairs.

In the hall, Ariel was on the watch for me.

As I approached her, I happened to be putting on my gloves. She stopped
me