nd moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence
in the face--the insolence of power.

The sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness
rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had
ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of
the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no
sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of
the girl's dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He
scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible magic
of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being,
telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the
truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside him with so
strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. As
he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived,
dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he
was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and
stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain
caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting
smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in
the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing.
Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious
glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom
she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous
orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled
about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene
through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms
crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the
hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he
knew to be her mother.

The vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried
time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened.... And
then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl's eyes
gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty
little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.

"And you," he whispered tremblingly--"you child of visions and
enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even
before I saw?"

She drew herself up besi