ustomed to hew his own way through life, despising the trodden
paths, overcoming all obstacles by grim persistence.

Louder and louder swelled the tumult. It was evident that nothing but a
repetition of the wonder-dance would content the audience. They yelled
themselves hoarse for it; and when, light as air, incredibly swift, the
green Dragon-Fly darted back, they outdid themselves in the madness of
their welcome. The noise seemed to shake the building.

Only the man in the front row with the iron-grey eyes and iron-hard
mouth made no movement or sound of any sort. He merely watched with
unchanging intentness the face that gleamed, ashen-white, above the
shimmering metallic green tights that clothed the dancer's slim body.

The noise ceased as the wild tarantella proceeded. There fell a deep
hush, broken only by the silver notes of a flute played somewhere behind
the curtain. The dancer's movements were wholly without sound. The
quivering, whirling feet scarcely seemed to touch the floor, it was a
dance of inspiration, possessing a strange and irresistible fascination,
a weird and meteoric rush, that held the onlookers with bated breath.

It lasted for perhaps two minutes, that intense and trancelike
stillness; then, like, a stone flung into glassy depths, a woman's
scream rudely shattered it, a piercing, terror-stricken scream that
brought the rapt audience back to earth with a shock as the liquid music
of the flute suddenly ceased.

"Fire!" cried the voice. "Fire! Fire!"

There was an instant of horrified inaction, and in that instant a tongue
of flame shot like a fiery serpent through the closed curtains behind
the dancer. In a moment the cry was caught up and repeated in a dozen
directions, and even as it went from mouth to mouth the safety-curtain
began to descend.

The dancer was forgotten, swept as it were from the minds of the
audience as an insect whose life was of no account. From the back of the
stage came a roar like the roar of an open furnace. A great wave of heat
rushed into the hall, and people turned like terrified, stampeding
animals and made for the exits.

The Dragon-Fly still stood behind the footlights poised as if for
flight, glancing this way and that, shimmering from head to foot in the
awful glare that spread behind the descending curtain. It was evident
that retreat behind the scenes was impossible, and in another moment or
two that falling curtain would cut off the only way left.

B