hat has chanced
to make you accept the idea--an old idea, older than the lost continent
of Atlantis!--of creatures built up of finer life-cells than ours?"

Morgana looked at him, vaguely surprised by his tone and manner.

"Nothing has chanced that causes me any wonder," she said--"or that
would 'make' me accept any theory which I could not put to the test for
myself. But, out in New York while I have been away, a fellow-student
of mine--just a boy,--has found out the means of 'creating energy from
some unknown source'--that is, unknown to the scientists of
rule-and-line. They call his electric apparatus 'an atmospheric
generator.' Naturally this implies that the atmosphere has something to
'generate' which has till now remained hidden and undeveloped. I knew
this long ago. Had I NOT known it I could not have thought out the
secret of the 'White Eagle'!"

She paused to allow the murmured exclamations of her hearers to
subside,--then she went on--"You can easily understand that if
atmosphere generates ONE form of energy it is capable of many other
forms,--and on these lines there is nothing to be said, against the
possibility of 'elementals.' I feel quite 'elemental' myself in this
glorious moonlight!--just as if I could slip out of my body like a
butterfly out of a chrysalis and spread my wings!"

She lifted her fair arms upward with a kind of expansive rapture,--the
moonbeams seemed to filter through the delicate tissue of her garments
adding brightness to their folds and sparkling frostily on the diamonds
in her hair,--and even Lady Kingswood's very placid nature was
conscious of an unusual thrill, half of surprise and half of fear, at
the quite "other world" appearance she thus presented.

"You have rather the look of a butterfly!" she said, kindly--"One of
those beautiful tropical things--or a fairy!--only we don't know what
fairies are like as we have never seen any!"

Morgana laughed, and let her arms drop at her sides. She felt rather
than saw the admiring eyes of the two men upon her and her mood changed.

"Yes--it is a lovely night,--for Sicily,"--she said. "But it would be
lovelier in California!"

"In California!" echoed Rivardi--"Why California?"

"Why? Oh, I don't know why! I often think of California--it is so vast!
Sicily is a speck of garden-land compared with it--and when the moon
rises full over the great hills and spreads a wide sheet of silver over
the Pacific Ocean you begin to realise a s