pute with her father.

"It is very cleverly worked out, sir," I conceded. "But how do you
explain that Desire knew what I experienced with the Thing from the
Barrier, if my experiences were merely delirious dreams?"

"I have not yet understood that she did know," said the Professor dryly.
"She put the suggestions into your head; innocently, of course. When you
afterward compared notes and found they agreed, you cried 'miraculous'!
How is that, Miss Michell? Did you actually know what Roger experienced
in these excursions before he told you of them?"

Desire gazed at him with her meditative eyes, so darkly lovely, yet
never quite to lose their individual difference from any other lovely
eyes I have ever seen. The eyes, I thought then and still think, of one
who has seen more, or at least seen into farther spaces, than most of
treadmill-trotting humanity. She wore one of the new frocks for which
Phillida and she had already made a flying trip to town; a most
sophisticated frock from Fifth Avenue, with frivolous French shoes to
correspond. Her hair of a Lorelei was demurely coiled and wound about
her little head. Yet some indescribable atmosphere closed her delicately
around, an impalpable wall between her and the commonplace. Even the
desiccated, material Professor was aware of this influence and took off
his spectacles uneasily, wiped them and put them on again to contemplate
her.

"I am not sure," she answered him with careful candor. "I believe that I
could always tell when the Dark One had been with him. I could feel
that, here," she touched her breast. "I knew what its visits were like,
because I was brought up to know by my father and was told the history
of the three Desire Michells. My father had studied deeply and taught
me--I shall not tell anyone all he taught me! I do not want to think of
those things. Some of them I have told to Roger. Some of them are quite
harmless and pleasant, like the secret formula for making the Rose of
Jerusalem perfume; which has virtues not common, as Roger can say who
has felt it revive him from faintness. But there are places into which
we should not thrust ourselves. It is like--like suicide. One's mind
must be perverted before certain things can be done. And that is the
true sin--to debase one's soul. All men discover and learn of science
and the universe by honest duty and effort is good, is lofty and leads
up. Nothing is forbidden to us. But if we turn aside to the low door