No sooner had the tempo changed than a spirit of new life seemingly entered the girl’s frame.  A smile, transforming her features, wavered over her countenance, kindling fitful lightnings of returning consciousness in her dark, mysterious eyes.  Looking about her with an expression of wide-eyed surprise, she eagerly drank in the sounds of the violin; her graceful movements became more and more violent, till she whirled in ever-widening circles round about the roofless palace chamber, athwart which flurried bats swirled noiselessly through the gathering twilight.  Hither and thither she glided, no sooner completing the circle in one direction than, snapping her fingers with a passionate cry, she wheeled round in an opposite course, sometimes clapping her hands together and catching up snatches of my own melody, sometimes waving aloft or pressing to her bosom the red kerchief or mucadore she had worn knotted in her hair, which, now unloosened, twined about her ivory-like neck and shoulders in a serpentine coil.

Fear, love, anguish, and pleasure seemed alternately to possess her mobile countenance.  Her face indicated violent transitions of passion; her hands appeared as if struggling after articulate expression of their own; her limbs were contorted with emotion:  in short, every nerve and fibre in her body seemed to translate the music into movement.

As I looked on, a demon seemed to enter my brain and fingers, hurrying me into a Bacchanalian frenzy of sound; and the faster I played, the more furiously her dizzily gliding feet flashed hither and thither in a bewildering, still-renewing maze, so that from her to me and me to her an electric impulse of rhythmical movement perpetually vibrated to and fro.

Ever and anon the semicircle of eagerly watching girls, sympathetically thrilled by the spectacle, clapped their hands, shouting for joy; and balancing themselves on tiptoe, joined in the headlong dance.  And as they glided to and fro, the wild roses and ivy and long tendrils of the vine, flaunting it on the crumbling walls, seemed to wave in unison and dance round the dancing girls.

As I went on playing the never-ending, still-beginning tune, night overtook us, and we should have been in profound obscurity but for continuous brilliant flashes of lightning shooting up from the horizon, like the gleaming lances hurled as from the vanguard of an army of Titans.

In the absorbing interest, however, with which we watched the deliriously whirling figure, unconscious of aught but the music, we took but little note of the lightning.  Sometimes, when from some black turreted thunder-cloud, a triple-pronged dart came hissing and crackling to the earth as though launched by the very hand of Jove, I saw thirteen hands suddenly lifted, thirteen fingers instinctively flying from brow to breast making the sign of the cross, and heard thirteen voices mutter as one, “Nel nome del Padre, e del Figlio, e dello Spirito Santo.”