y was clear and cloudless, yet even while
she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in
the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the
sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill,
and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the
inn rose about him in the air.

"Transform, transform!" she cried again, her voice rising like a song.
"Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the Sabbath,
to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its
evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments
prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!"

She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with
flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change
swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him
with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the
power before which fades all that is good.

A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the
girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her
wicked joy.

"Satan is there!" she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw
him with her to the edge of the wall. "Satan has come. The Sacraments
call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and
dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!"

Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release
himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but
mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he
shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits
instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely
shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and
were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It
was answered.

The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him
darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The
crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of
wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top
of the stone wall; and Ilse clung to him with her long shining arms,
smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Ilse alone,
for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The
pungent odour