etrated and divided, as well as surrounded, by the darkness.
It seemed as if my eyes would never come quite to themselves. I pressed
their balls and looked and looked again, but what I saw would not grow
distinct. Blackness mingled with form, silence and undefined motion
possessed the wide space. All was a dim, confused dance, filled with
recurrent glimpses of shapes not unknown to me. Now appeared a woman,
with glorious eyes looking out of a skull; now an armed figure on a
skeleton horse; now one now another of the hideous burrowing phantasms.
I could trace no order and little relation in the mingling and crossing
currents and eddies. If I seemed to catch the shape and rhythm of a
dance, it was but to see it break, and confusion prevail. With the
shifting colours of the seemingly more solid shapes, mingled a multitude
of shadows, independent apparently of originals, each moving after
its own free shadow-will. I looked everywhere for the princess, but
throughout the wildly changing kaleidoscopic scene, could not see her
nor discover indication of her presence. Where was she? What might she
not be doing? No one took the least notice of me as I wandered hither
and thither seeking her. At length losing hope, I turned away to look
elsewhere. Finding the wall, and keeping to it with my hand, for even
then I could not see it, I came, groping along, to a curtained opening
into the vestibule.

Dimly moonlighted, the cage of the leopardess was the arena of what
seemed a desperate although silent struggle. Two vastly differing forms,
human and bestial, with entangled confusion of mingling bodies and
limbs, writhed and wrestled in closest embrace. It had lasted but an
instant when I saw the leopardess out of the cage, walking quietly to
the open door. As I hastened after her I threw a glance behind me: there
was the leopardess in the cage, couching motionless as when I saw her
first.

The moon, half-way up the sky, was shining round and clear; the bodiless
shadow I had seen the night before, was walking through the trees
toward the gate; and after him went the leopardess, swinging her tail.
I followed, a little way off, as silently as they, and neither of them
once looked round. Through the open gate we went down to the city, lying
quiet as the moonshine upon it. The face of the moon was very still, and
its stillness looked like that of expectation.

The Shadow took his way straight to the stair at the top of which I had
lain t