unlucky green gown. Had she in her
despair flung herself headlong into the torrent? Or had she been
carried off alive by the Devil? No one could tell. Either way she was
certainly damned, which greatly consoled the lady for having failed to
find her.

Had they seen her they would hardly have known her again, she was so
changed. Only the eyes remained, not brilliant, but armed with a very
strange and a rather deterring glimmer. She herself was afraid of
frightening: she never lowered them, but looked sideways, so that the
full force of their beams might be lost by slanting them. From the
sudden browning of her hue people would have said that she had passed
through the flame. But the more watchful felt that the flame was
rather in herself, that she bore about her an impure and scorching
heat. The fiery dart with which Satan had pierced her was still
there, and, as through a baleful lamp, shot forth a wild, but
fearfully witching sheen. Shrinking from her, you would yet stand
still, with a strange trouble filling your every sense.

She saw herself at the mouth of one of those troglodyte caves, such as
you find without number in the hills of the Centre and the West of
France. It was in the borderland, then wild, between the country of
Merlin and the country of Melusina. Some moors stretching out of sight
still bear witness to the ancient wars, the unceasing havoc, the many
horrors, which prevented the country being peopled again. There the
Devil was in his home. Of the few inhabitants most were his zealous
worshippers. Whatever attractions he might have found in the rough
brakes of Lorraine, the black pine-forests of the Jura, or the briny
deserts of Burgos, his preferences lay, perhaps, in our western
marches. There might be found not only the visionary shepherd, that
Satanic union of the goat and the goatherd, but also a closer
conspiracy with nature, a deeper insight into remedies and poisons, a
mysterious connection, whose links we know not, with Toledo the
learned, the University of the Devil.

The winter was setting in: its breath having first stripped the trees,
had heaped together the leaves and small boughs of dead wood. All this
she found prepared for her at the mouth of her gloomy den. By a wood
and moor, half a mile across, you came down within reach of some
villages, which had grown up beside a watercourse. "Behold your
kingdom!" said the voice within her. "To-day a beggar, to-morrow you
shall be queen of t