e voice.

"What sorcery have you practised upon that poor girl, to drive her into
this state of distraction, red fiend?" was the answering question, bold
enough in seeming, though Tom Leslie, asked in regard to the matter
to-day, would undoubtedly acknowledge that he had felt far less tremor
when under the heaviest play of the Russian cannon at Inkermann, than
when throwing this sharp taunt into the teeth of the sorceress.

"Nothing but what _you_ have seen and endured!" was the reply, made in
the same tone as before. "I have shown them the truth, and the truth is
terrible. It is murder and ruin in their own households--it is battle
and death around those they love--it is desolation and destruction to
the land! Go!--those who cannot witness my power without blenching,
should never seek me; and _you_ blench like those sick girls--I have
seen you blench before?"

"Seen _me_?" echoed Leslie.

"Seen _you_!" was the fierce reply of the sorceress. "Fool! do you think
I cannot penetrate that thin disguise--that old man's hair and those
false wrinkles? You were younger-looking, eighteen months since, in
another land where the eagle screams less but tears its enemies more
deeply with its talons!"

"I _was_," answered Leslie, carried beyond himself. "I remember the Rue
la Reynie Ogniard, and I acknowledge your fearful power, though I know
not if it comes from heaven or hell! But tell me--who are _you_, so
magnificently beautiful, and yet so--so--" and here (a rare thing for
him,) the voice of Tom Leslie faltered.

"So horribly hideous, you would say," broke in the sorceress. "Stay! you
have said one word that touches the woman within me. You have recognized
my beauty as well as my terror. Look for one instant at what no mortal
eye has seen for years or may ever see again! Look!"

Tom Leslie started, nay, staggered--for no other word can express the
motion--back towards the door, infinitely more surprised than he had
been on the night of his first adventure with the sorceress. She held
something in her hand, but that could only be seen afterwards: for the
moment his eyes could only behold that marvellous face. If the Sons of
God when they intermarried with the beautiful daughters of clay, left
any descendants behind them, certainly that face must have belonged to
one of the number. No longer ghastly red, but almost marble white, with
the hue of health yet mantling beneath the wondrous transparent skin,
and every line and c