answered for him, in stern and menaceful tones: "Who can tell us that
more certainly than Lucifer who fell from heaven?"

With a bitter cry the Lady Pelagia rose from her seat, and raised her
beautiful white arms above her head; but the voice continued: "Breathe
on her, Hilary--breathe the breath of the name of Christ!"

And the Bishop, rising, breathed on the white lovely face the breath of
the holy name; and in an instant the starry eyes were darkened, and the
spirit and flower of life perished in her sweet body; and the
companions saw no longer the Lady Pelagia, but in her stead a statue of
white marble. At a glance Hilary knew it for a statue of the goddess
whom men in Rome called Venus and in Greece Aphrodite, and with a
shudder he remembered that another of her names was Pelagia, the Lady
of the Sea. But, swifter even than that thought, it seemed to them as
though the statue were smitten by an invisible hand, for it reeled and
fell, shattered to fragments; and the lights were extinguished, and the
air of the summer night blew upon their faces, and in the east, whence
cometh our hope, there was a glimmer of dawn.

Praying fervently, and bewailing the brief joy they had taken in the
beauty of that dreadful goddess, they waited for light to guide them
from that evil place.

When the day broadened they perceived that they were in the midst of
the ruins of an ancient Roman city, overgrown with bush and tree.
Around them lay, amid beds of nettles and great dock leaves, and darnel
and tangles of briars, and tall foxgloves and deadly nightshade, the
broken pillars of a marble temple. This had been the fair house, lit
with lamps, wherein they had sat at feast. Close beside them were
scattered the white fragments of the image of the beautiful Temptress.

As they turned to depart three grey wolves snarled at them from the
ruins, but an unseen hand held these in leash, and Hilary and his
companions went on their way unharmed.

The Dream of the White Lark

This was a thing that happened long and long ago, in the glimmering
morning of the Christian time in Erinn. And it may have happened to
the holy Maedog of Ferns, or to Enan the Angelic, or it may have been
Molasius of Devenish--I cannot say. But over the windy sea in his
small curragh of bull's hide the Saint sailed far away to the southern
land; and for many a month he travelled afoot through the dark forests,
and the sunny corn-lands, and over the snow