He took her key from her bag, caught up his hat, and hastened out.

But she did not sit down again.  She was no calmer for his quick disappearance.  In that moment when he had recoiled from her she had had the expression of some handsome and angered snake, its hood puffed, ready to strike.  She stood dazed; one would have supposed that that ill-advised kiss of his had indeed been the Master Word she sought, the Word she felt approaching, the Word to which the objects of the Museum, the book, that rustle of a sea she had never seen, had been but the ever “warming” stages.  Some merest trifle stood between her and those elfin cries, between her and that thin golden mist in which faintly seen shapes seemed to move—­shapes almost of tossed arms, waving, brandishing objects strangely all but familiar.  That roaring of the sea was not the rushing of her own blood in her ears, that rosy flush not the artificial glow of the cheap red lampshade.  The shapes were almost as plain as if she saw them in some clear but black mirror, the sounds almost as audible as if she heard them through some not very thick muffling....

“Quick—­the book,” she muttered.

But even as she stretched out her hand for it, again came that solemn sound of warning.  As if something sought to stay it, she had deliberately to thrust her hand forward.  Again the high dinning calls of “Hasten!  Hasten!” were mingled with that deeper “Beware!” She knew in her soul that, once over that terrible edge, the Dream would become the Reality and the Reality the Dream.  She knew nothing of the fluidity of the thing called Personality—­not a thing at all, but a state, a balance, a relation, a resultant of forces so delicately in equilibrium that a touch, and—­pff!—­the horror of Formlessness rushed over all.

As she hesitated a new light appeared in the chamber.  Within the frame of the small square window, beyond the ragged line of the chimney-cowls, an edge of orange brightness showed.  She leaned forward.  It was the full moon, rusty and bloated and flattened by the earth-mist.

The next moment her hand had clutched at the book.

"Whence came ye, merry Damsels!  Whence came ye
So many, and so many, and such glee? 
Why have ye left your bowers desolate,
      Your lutes, and gentler fate? 
’We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing A-conquering! 
Bacchus, young Bacchus!  Good or ill betide
We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide! 
Come hither, Lady fair, and joined be
      To our wild minstrelsy!’"

There was an instant in which darkness seemed to blot out all else; then it rolled aside, and in a blaze of brightness was gone.  It was gone, and she stood face to face with her Dream, that for two thousand years had slumbered in the blood of her and her line.  She stood, with mouth agape and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour.  The other was the Dream now, and these!... they came down,