otten the Dances of the Moon?"

There rose before Lawrence Teck a vision of an inferno deep in these
forests, red from great fires that devoured the moonlight. The scene
was peopled by thousands of beings too dreadful, surely, in their
appearance and actions, to be human--beings that danced in regiments
with foaming lips, that howled out their frenzy amid the roar of drums,
that fell right and left, convulsed, insane, cataleptic, while the
witch doctors, impassive in their masks, emerged through the smoke of
the fires with bloody hands. It was the reign of nature in its densest
stronghold; it was that which hovers like an echo over the suave,
ordered landscapes of civilization; it was the seductive horror that
invades the modern brain in dreams, or in some moment of utter
bitterness and despair.

For a moment he still leaned forward, peering into those glittering,
dark eyes, though what he saw was something beyond that face--the
destruction of all the toil of fifty thousand years, the suicide of a
soul. With a shudder he lay back upon the bed.

"Return to the King."

For five minutes the messenger sat motionless; but Lawrence Teck did
not speak again. Rising at last, in a fluff of his marabout plumes, he
armed himself with his spear and his oval shield covered with an
heraldic design.

"The King will weep," he said. "And the little sisters of the King,
and all those who loved you, oh, dead man."

He raised the curtain, and stalked away through the camp, clashing
superbly between the fires, while the clustered askaris and porters
regarded him dismally.

A white man in a fleece-lined coat, who had been waiting in the open
for the messenger to depart, entered the tent and sat down beside the
bed.

He was Cornelius Rysbroek.

"Shall you try to march to-morrow?"

Lawrence Teck did not reply. There was no strength in him even to move
his hand, after that gesture with which he had put from him, though
half lost in fever, the ultimate temptation. Cornelius Rysbroek,
believing that he saw here defeat instead of victory, smiled.

In his eyes appeared, perfected, the light that had made them
exceptional for years, a flash from that psychical lake of fire and
brimstone in which his heart had so long been burning up. For the
tables were turned at last: the weak one, the inferior, had become the
stronger, the better. A thousand wounds seemed to heal themselves in
him as he contemplated the prostration of the e