ts galleries receding into a heaven of ebon
blackness. She wandered about it, sitting first here, then there,
becoming intimate with the monster on whom she sometimes felt as if her
life and fortunes depended.

"All this we are doing for you!" something within her seemed to whisper.
"Will you be satisfied with our efforts? Will you reward us?"

And then, in imagination, she saw the monster changed. No longer it
brooded, watched, considered, waited. It had sprung into ardent life,
put off its darkness, wrapped itself in a garment of light.

"You have given me what I needed!" she heard it saying. "Look!"

And she saw the crowd!

Then sometimes she shut her eyes. She wanted to feel the crowd, those
masses of souls in masses of bodies for which she had done so much.
Always surely they had been keeping the ring for Claude and for her. And
it seemed to her that, unseen, they had circled the Isle in the far-off
Algerian garden where she first spoke of her love and desire for Claude,
that they had ever since been attending upon her life. Had they not
muttered about the white house that held the worker? Had they not stared
at the one who sat waiting by the fountain? Had they not seen the
arrival of Jacob Crayford? Had they not assisted at those long
colloquies when the opera which was for them was changed? Absurdly, she
felt as if they had. And now, very soon, it would be for them to speak.
And striving to shut her eyes more firmly, or pressing her fingers upon
them, Charmian saw moving hands, a forest of them below, circles above
circles of them, and in the distance of the gods a mist of them. And she
saw the shining of thousands of eyes, in which were mirrored strangely,
almost mystically, souls that Claude's music, conceived in patience and
labor, had moved and that wished to tell him so.

She saw the crowd! And she saw it returning to listen again. And she
remembered, with the extraordinary vitality of an ardent woman, who was
still little more than a girl, how she had sat opposite to the
white-faced, red-haired heroine on the first night of Jacques Sennier's
_Paradis Terrestre_; how she had watched her, imaginatively entered into
her mind, become one with her. That night Claude had written his letter
to her, Charmian. The force in her, had entered into him, had inspired
him to do what he did that night, had inspired him to do what he had
since done always near to her. And soon, very soon, the white-faced,
red-haired w