ried out without knowing it, and covered her face. "O God," she
prayed wildly, "save us from this! Save us! Save us!"

The man at the piano could not have heard her cry. Of that she was
certain. But their souls were in more subtle communion than any
established by bodily word or touch. He must have known, have fathomed
her anguish. For quite suddenly, as if a restraining hand had been
laid upon him, he checked that dread torrent of sound. A few bitter
chords, a few stray notes that somehow spoke to her of a spirit
escaped and wandering alone and naked in a desert of indescribable
emptiness, and then silence--a crushing, fearful silence like the
ashes of a burnt-out fire.

"And in hell he lift up his eyes." ... Why did those words flash
through her brain as though a voice had uttered them? She bowed her head
lower, lower, barely conscious of Jeanie's enfolding arms. She was as one
in the presence of a vision, hearing words that were spoken to her alone.

"And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments...."

She waited quivering. Surely there was more to come. She listened for it
even while she shrank in every nerve.

It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within
her. "Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which
would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that
would come from thence."

The words were spoken, the vision passed. Avery sat huddled in her chair
as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from
which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.

The lightning flashed again, and the thunder crashed above them like the
clanging of brazen gates. From the room behind them came the sound of a
man's laugh, but it was a laugh that chilled her to the soul.

Again there came the sound of the piano,--a tremendous chord, then a
slow-swelling volume of harmony, a muffled burst of music like the coming
of a great procession still far away.

Avery sprang upright as one galvanized into action by an electric force.
"I cannot bear it!" she cried aloud, "I cannot bear it!"

She almost thrust Jeanie from her. "Oh, go, child, go! Tell him--tell
him--" Her voice broke, went into a gasping utterance more painful than
speech, finally dropped into hysterical sobbing.

Jeanie sprang into the dark room with a cry of, "Piers, oh, Piers!"--and
the music stopped, went out utterly as flame extinguished in water.

"What's the matter?" said Pi