A flash of lightning quivered above the tree-tops and was gone.  Jeanie drew in her breath, saying no word.  Avery shrank and closed her eyes.  She could hear her heart beating audibly, like the throbbing of a distant drum.  The suspense was terrible.

There came from far away the growl and mutter of the rising storm.  The leaves of the garden began to tremble.  And then, ere that roll of distant thunder had died away, another sound came through the darkness—­a sound that was almost terrifying in its suddenness, and the grand piano began to speak.

What music it uttered, Avery knew not.  It was such as she had never heard before.  It was unearthly, it was devilish, a fiendish chorus that was like the laughter of a thousand demons—­a pandemonium that shocked her unutterably.

Just as once he had drawn aside for her the veil that shrouded the Holy Place, so now he rent open the gates of hell and showed her the horrors of the prison-house, forcing her to look upon them, forcing her to understand.

She clung to Jeanie’s hand in nightmare fear.  The anguish of the revelation was almost unendurable.  She felt as if he had caught her quivering soul and was thrusting it into an inferno from which it could never rise again.  Through and above that awful laughter she seemed to hear the crackling of the flames, to feel the blistering heat that had consumed so many, to see the red glare of the furnace gaping wide before her.

She cried out without knowing it, and covered her face.  “O God,” she prayed wildly, “save us from this!  Save us!  Save us!”

The man at the piano could not have heard her cry.  Of that she was certain.  But their souls were in more subtle communion than any established by bodily word or touch.  He must have known, have fathomed her anguish.  For quite suddenly, as if a restraining hand had been laid upon him, he checked that dread torrent of sound.  A few bitter chords, a few stray notes that somehow spoke to her of a spirit escaped and wandering alone and naked in a desert of indescribable emptiness, and then silence—­a crushing, fearful silence like the ashes of a burnt-out fire.

“And in hell he lift up his eyes.” ...  Why did those words flash through her brain as though a voice had uttered them?  She bowed her head lower, lower, barely conscious of Jeanie’s enfolding arms.  She was as one in the presence of a vision, hearing words that were spoken to her alone.

“And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments....”

She waited quivering.  Surely there was more to come.  She listened for it even while she shrank in every nerve.

It came at length slowly, heavily, like a death-sentence uttered within her.  “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed:  so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.”

The words were spoken, the vision passed.  Avery sat huddled in her chair as one stricken to the earth, rapt in a trance of dread foreboding from which Jeanie was powerless to rouse her.