Somehow the remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the phrases that he had so lovingly invented, brought back again the dusky figures that danced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps; and again the naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the fields, and the red glare lit up the mildewed walls and the black hopeless windows.  He gasped for breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked of decay and rottenness, and the odor of the clay was in his nostrils.

That unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker and engulfed him, despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a horrible dread.  In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away and certain awful things would appear.

He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not.  Deep, deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away.  The Roman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring, and behind them a glow and heat of fire.  There were hideous shapes that swarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned to him, and rose into the air, into the flame that was smitten from heaven about the walls.  And amongst them was the form of the beloved, but jets of flame issued from her breasts, and beside her was a horrible old woman, naked; and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.

He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been found in old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances.  She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.

He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered him.  All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the common world he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes.  Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other.  He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the night when the moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her exalted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath.  Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not imagined all the rest?

Again he found himself in the dusky lane, and Annie floated down to him from the moon above the hill.  His head sank upon her breast again, but, alas, it was aflame.  And he looked down, and he saw that his own flesh was aflame, and he knew that the fire could never be quenched.

There was a heavyweight upon his head, his feet were nailed to the floor, and his arms bound tight beside him.  He seemed to himself to rage and struggle with the strength of a madman; but his hand only stirred and quivered a little as it lay upon the desk.

Again he was astray in the mist; wandering through the waste avenues of a city that had been ruined from ages.  It had been splendid as Rome, terrible as Babylon, and for ever the darkness had covered it, and it lay desolate for ever in the accursed plain.  And far and far the grey passages stretched into the night, into the icy fields, into the place of eternal gloom.