im behind the
earth-mists. The light increased. Distant objects, until now hidden,
came into view, and as the radiance brightened, Vanamee, looking down
upon the little valley, saw a spectacle of incomparable beauty. All the
buds of the Seed ranch had opened. The faint tints of the flowers had
deepened, had asserted themselves. They challenged the eye. Pink became
a royal red. Blue rose into purple. Yellow flamed into orange. Orange
glowed golden and brilliant. The earth disappeared under great bands and
fields of resplendent colour. Then, at length, the moon abruptly soared
zenithward from out the veiling mist, passing from one filmy haze to
another. For a moment there was a gleam of a golden light, and Vanamee,
his eyes searching the shade at the foot of the hill, felt his heart
suddenly leap, and then hang poised, refusing to beat. In that instant
of passing light, something had caught his eye. Something that moved,
down there, half in and half out of the shadow, at the hill's foot.
It had come and gone in an instant. The haze once more screened the
moonlight. The shade again engulfed the vision. What was it he had seen?
He did not know. So brief had been that movement, the drowsy brain had
not been quick enough to interpret the cipher message of the eye. Now
it was gone. But something had been there. He had seen it. Was it the
lifting of a strand of hair, the wave of a white hand, the flutter of a
garment's edge? He could not tell, but it did not belong to any of those
sights which he had seen so often in that place. It was neither the
glancing of a moth's wing, the nodding of a wind-touched blossom, nor
the noiseless flitting of a bat. It was a gleam merely, faint, elusive,
impossible of definition, an intangible agitation, in the vast, dim blur
of the darkness.

And that was all. Until now no single real thing had occurred, nothing
that Vanamee could reduce to terms of actuality, nothing he could put
into words. The manifestation, when not recognisable to that strange
sixth sense of his, appealed only to the most refined, the most delicate
perception of eye and ear. It was all ephemeral, filmy, dreamy, the
mystic forming of the Vision--the invisible developing a concrete
nucleus, the starlight coagulating, the radiance of the flowers
thickening to something actual; perfume, the most delicious fragrance,
becoming a tangible presence.

But into that garden the serpent intruded. Though cradled in the slow
rhythm of