yed priestess lead him up to the very maw of her
god. She had lured him into this land by what he knew now to have been a
trick; might she not have worse tricks than that in store for him?

She held him, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of her
fingers, if he could keep his eyes turned from hers. Therein lay her
real power, but he could fight it if he chose. And he began to hear more
clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of
the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves.
The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.

Suddenly he made up his mind. He stopped, breaking the clasp of the
girl's hand.

"I'm not going," he said.

She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from her
in a gush of incoherence. But he dared not meet her eyes, and they
conveyed no meaning to him. Resolutely he turned away, ignoring her
voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. She called after
him once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as
that in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but he kept on doggedly,
not looking back. She laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that
echoed uneasily in his mind long after the sound of it had died upon the
twilit air.

After a while he glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see
the luminous dazzle of her body still glowing in the dim glade where he
had left her; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.

He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt his ears, and in a
solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk. They had
vanished with the fire-bright girl, and the whole twilight land was
empty save for himself. He plodded on across the dark grass, crushing
the upturned flower-faces under his boots and asking himself wearily if
he could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed
and tapestried solitude that had swallowed him up. In that thunderous
quiet, in that deathly solitude, he went on.

* * * * *

When he had walked for what seemed to him much longer than it should
have taken to reach his starting-point, and still no sign of an exit
appeared, he began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land
of Thag. For the first time he realized that he had come through no
tangible gateway. He had only stepped out of a shadow, and--now that he
thought of it--there were n