But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the Cosmos—­how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal energy?  Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost?  How had he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls through the ages?  No man could live after this terrific peep at the Ancient of Days.  Debora’s eyes peered into Ferval’s, filled with the music that enmeshes.  And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto the glittering edges of eternity....

Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space.  She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights.  As her gaze collided with her companion’s he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities.  She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the Covenant.  And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John’s head, and her brow was wreathed with serpents.  Followed the convulsive curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish slaves.  Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear.  He crouched under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of the girl were shot with crescent lightnings.  Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men!  The primal charmers affrighted his vision:  Lilith, Ourania, Astarte, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora—­this new Jephtha’s daughter dancing to her doom as her father fingered the Tune of Time.  In the whirling patterns of her dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veil of Maya, the veil of illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the fugacious symbols of Time....

...  As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like.  His senses and imagination had been hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl.  With such a mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth!  His brain was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.

“Debora,” he whispered, “you must never go away from me.”  She hung her head.  The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him.  Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and slowly they walked in the tender night.  She was the first to speak:—­

“You did not hear a madman’s story,” she asserted in her clear, candid voice, which had for him the hue of a cleft pomegranate.  “It is the history of my father’s soul.  It is his own sin he expiates.”