“Once more—­oh, answer me!  Tell me my name!”

Ed’s steps were heard on the oilclothed portion of the staircase.

“My name—­oh, my name!” she cried in an agony of suspense....  “Oh, they will not wait for me!  They have lighted the torches—­they run up and down the shore with torches—­oh, cannot you see me?...”

Suddenly she dashed to the chair on which the litter of linings and tissue-paper lay.  She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the fire.  They caught and flared.  There was a call upon the stairs, and the sound of somebody mounting in haste.

“Once—­once only—­my name!”

The soul of the Bacchante rioted, struggled to escape from her eyes.  Then as the door was flung open, she heard, and gave a terrifying shout of recognition.

“I hear—­I almost hear—­but once more....  IO! Io, Io, Io!”

Ed, in the doorway, stood for one moment agape; the next, ignorant of the full purport of his own words—­ignorant that though man may come westwards he may yet bring his worship with him—­ignorant that to make the Dream the Reality and the Reality the Dream is Heaven’s dreadfullest favour—­and ignorant that, that Edge once crossed, there is no return to the sanity and sweetness and light that are only seen clearly in the moment when they are lost for ever—­he had dashed down the stairs crying in a voice hoarse and high with terror: 

“She’s mad!  She’s mad!”

THE ACCIDENT

I

The street had not changed so much but that, little by little, its influence had come over Romarin again; and as the clock a street or two away had struck seven he had stood, his hands folded on his stick, first curious, then expectant, and finally, as the sound had died away, oddly satisfied in his memory.  The clock had a peculiar chime, a rather elaborate one, ending inconclusively on the dominant and followed after an unusually long interval by the stroke of the hour itself.  Not until its last vibration had become too subtle for his ear had Romarin resumed the occupation that the pealing of the hour had interrupted.

It was an occupation that especially tended to abstraction of mind—­the noting in detail of the little things of the street that he had forgotten with such completeness that they awakened only tardy responses in his memory now that his eyes rested on them again.  The shape of a doorknocker, the grouping of an old chimney-stack, the crack, still there, in a flagstone—­somewhere deep in the past these things had associations; but they lay very deep, and the disturbing of them gave Romarin a curious, desolate feeling, as of returning to things he had long out-grown.