al customs.

A cruel, an accursed time, a time big with despair!

* * * * *

We have been long discoursing; but the dawn is well-nigh come. In a
moment the hour will strike for the spirits to take themselves away.
The Witch feels her dismal flowers already withering on her brow.
Farewell, her royalty, perhaps her life! Where would they be, if the
day still found her there?

Of Satan, what shall she make? A flame, a cinder? He asks for nothing
better; knowing well, in his craftiness, that the only way to live and
to be born again, is first to die.

And will he die, he who as the mighty summoner of the dead, granted to
them that mourn their only joy on earth, the love they had lost, the
dream they had cherished? Ah, no! he is very sure to live.

Will he die, he that mighty spirit who, finding Creation accurst, and
Nature lying cold upon the ground, flung thither like a dirty
foster-child from off the Church's garment, gathered her up and placed
her on his bosom? In truth it cannot be.

Will he die, he the one great physician of the Middle Ages, of a
world that, falling sick, was saved by his poisons and bidden, poor
fool, to live?

As the gay rogue is sure of living, he dies wholly at his ease. He
shuffles out of himself, cleverly burns up his fine goatskin, and
disappears in a blaze of dawn.

But _she_ who made Satan, who made all things, good or ill, whose
countenance was given to so many forms of love, of devotion, and of
crime,--to what end will she come? Behold her all lonely on her waste
moorland.

She is not, as they say, the dread of all. Many will bless her. More
than one have found her beautiful, would sell their share in Paradise
to dare be near her. But all around her is a wide gulf. They who
admire, are none the less afraid of this all-powerful Medea, with her
fair deep eyes, and the thrilling adders of her dark overflowing hair.

To her thus lonely for ever, for evermore without love, what is there
left? Nothing but the Demon who had suddenly disappeared.

"'Tis well, good Devil, let us go. I am utterly loath to stay here any
more. Hell itself is far preferable. Farewell to the world!"

She must live but a very little longer, to play out the dreadful drama
she had herself begun. Near her, ready saddled by the obedient Satan,
stood a huge black horse, the fire darting from his eyes and nostrils.
She sprang upon him with one bound.

They follow her with their ey