“But, dear friend, I fear one other thing; the gas which uncle has discovered is so tenuous that it is a million times lighter than air; but it is ever at a terrible tension—­I mean it is dangerous if not carefully treated.  Last summer, one afternoon, a valve broke and a large quantity escaped from the reservoir, luckily on the ocean side.  It caused a storm and water-spouts, and destroyed a few vessels.  The coruscating gas creates a vacuum into which the air rushes with incredible velocity.  So promise me that while we are flying you will stay with the police at the gas machines and keep off the crowd.  Promise!”

“But I shan’t permit you to go up with this renegade to the revolutionary cause—­” he began impetuously.  She put warning fingers to her lips.  In the white flowing robes of an antique priest, Karospina came out to them and took Gerald by the hand.  He was abstracted and haggard, and his eyes glared about him.  He chanted in a monotone:—­

“The time is at hand.  Soon you will see the Angels of the Seals.  I shall show the multitude Death on the Pale Horse and the vision of Ezekiel.  And you shall behold the star called Wormwood, the great star of the third angel, which shall fall like a burning lamp upon the waters and turn them bitter.  And at the last you will see the chariot of Elijah caught up to heaven in a fiery whirlwind.  In it will be seated the Princess Mila—­we, the conquerors of the wicked world.”

“Yes, but only as an image, an illusion,” ejaculated the unhappy lover, “not in reality.”

“As she is,” imperiously answered Karospina, and seizing Mila by the arm, said, “Come!” She threw a kiss to Gerald and in her eyes were tears.  He saw them and could have wept himself.  He followed the sacrificial pair as far as the reservoir, muttering warnings in which were mixed the fates of Phaethon and Simon Magus—­that heretic who mimicked the miracles of the apostles.

* * * * *

It was now dark; the order to extinguish all lights on the moor had been obeyed.  Only a panting sound as if from a wilderness of frightened animals betrayed the presence of thousands.  As long as the sun shone there had been a babel of sound; at the disappearance of our parent planet, a hushed awe had fallen with the night.  Gone the rude joking and wrangling, the crying of children, and the shrill laughter of the women.  A bitter breeze swept across from the waters, and the stars were mere twinkling points.

Then from the vault of heaven darted a ribbon of emerald fire.  It became a luminous spiral when it touched the sea of glass, which was like unto a floor of crystal.  This was the sign of Karospina’s undertaking, his symbol of the road to moral perfection.  Gerald recalled Whistler’s pyrotechnical extravaganzas.  Following this came a pale moon which emerged from the north; a second, a third, a fourth, started up from the points of the compass, and after wabbling in the wind like gigantic balloons, merged overhead in an indescribable disk which assumed the features of Michael Angelo’s Moses.  Here is a new technique, indeed, thought Gerald; yet he could not detect its moral values.