ingers gently touched the strings while he was thinking. In a
few minutes he lifted his head, looked at me, and struck the first
notes--the prelude to the song. It was wild, barbaric, monotonous music,
utterly unlike any modern composition. Sometimes it suggested a slow
and undulating Oriental dance. Sometimes it modulated into tones which
reminded me of the severer harmonies of the old Gregorian chants. The
words, when they followed the prelude, were as wild, as recklessly free
from all restraint of critical rules, as the music. They were assuredly
inspired by the occasion; I was the theme of the strange song. And
thus--in one of the finest tenor voices I ever heard--my poet sang of
me:

"Why does she come? She reminds me of the lost; She reminds me of the
dead: In her form like the other, In her walk like the other: Why does
she come?

"Does Destiny bring her? Shall we range together The mazes of the past?
Shall we search together The secrets of the past? Shall we interchange
thoughts, surmises, suspicions? Does Destiny bring her?

"The Future will show. Let the night pass; Let the day come. I shall see
into Her mind: She will look into Mine. The Future will show."

His voice sank, his fingers touched the strings more and more feebly as
he approached the last lines. The overwrought brain needed and took its
reanimating repose. At the final words his eyes slowly closed. His head
lay back on the chair. He slept with his arms around his harp, as a
child sleeps hugging its last new toy.

We stole out of the room on tiptoe, and left Miserrimus Dexter--poet,
composer, and madman--in his peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER XXVI. MORE OF MY OBSTINACY.

ARIEL was downstairs in the shadowy hall, half asleep, half awake,
waiting to see the visitors clear of the house. Without speaking to us,
without looking at us, she led the way down the dark garden walk, and
locked the gate behind us. "Good-night, Ariel," I called out to her over
the paling. Nothing answered me but the tramp of her heavy footsteps
returning to the house, and the dull thump, a moment afterward, of the
closing door.

The footman had thoughtfully lighted the carriage lamps. Carrying one
of them to serve as a lantern, he lighted us over the wilds of the brick
desert, and landed us safely on the path by the high-road.

"Well!" said my mother-in-law, when we were comfortably seated in the
carriage again. "You have seen Miserrimus Dexter, and I hope you are
satis