wling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir. In lesser intensity it
produces the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that
performs prodigies of abandoned grace. Suddenly the sensuous exaltation
had come upon Jethro Fawe. It was as though he had discharged into his
system from some cells of his brain a flood which coursed like a stream
of soft fire.

In the pleasurable pain of such a mood he drew his bow across the
strings with a sweeping stroke, and then, for an instant, he ran hither
and thither on the strings testing the quality and finding the range
and capacity of the instrument. It was a scamper of hieroglyphics which
could only mean anything to a musician.

"Well, what do you think of him?" Ingolby asked as the Romany lowered
the bow. "Paganini--Joachim--Sarasate--any one, it is good enough," was
the half-abstracted reply.

"It is good enough for you--almost, eh?"

Ingolby meant his question as a compliment, but an evil look shot into
the Romany's face, and the bow twitched in his hand. He was not Paganini
or Sarasate, but that was no reason why he should be insulted.

Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and
he hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than
Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow. I've never heard
any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon.
I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle. I didn't, did
I? I gave five thousand dollars for it."

"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's
response. He was mollified by the praise he had received.

He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round
the room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only
returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which
sees but does not see--such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a
soulless monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear. Just
such a look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.

In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this
world as Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin--a
place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains
and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place
of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests
alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts. It was a plac