“Thank Heaven!” muttered Alan to himself, “I am safe from that witch for the next two months,” and through the eye-holes of his mask he contemplated her with loathing and alarm.

At the moment, indeed, she was not a pleasing spectacle, for in the heat and excitement of her mad dance she had cast off her gold breast-plate or stomacher, leaving herself naked except for her kirtle and the thin, gold-spangled robe upon her shoulders over which streamed her black, disordered hair.  Contrasting strangely in the silver moonlight with her glistening, copper-coloured body, the mask of Little Bonsa on her head glared round with its fixed crystal eyes and fiendish smile as she turned her long neck from side to side.  Seen thus she scarcely looked human, and Alan’s heart was filled with pity for the poor bedizened wretch she named her husband, who had just been forced to announce the date of his own suicide.

Soon, however, he forgot it, for a new act in the drama had begun.  Two priests clad in horns and tails leapt on to the dais and at a signal unlaced the mask of Little Bonsa.  Now the Asika lifted it from her streaming face and held it on high, then she lowered it to the level of her breast, and holding it in both hands, walked to the edge of the dais, whereon priests, disguised as fiends, began to leap at it, striving to reach it with their fingers and snatch it from her grasp.  One by one they leapt with the most desperate energy, each man being allowed to make three attempts, and Alan noted that this novel jumping competition was watched with the deepest interest by all the audience, at the time he knew not why.

The first two were evidently elderly men who failed to come anywhere near the mark.  Their failure was received with shouts of derision.  They sank exhausted to the ground and from the motion of his body Alan could see that one of them was weeping, while the other remained sullenly silent.  Then a younger man advanced and at the third try almost grasped the fetish.  Indeed he would have grasped it had he not met with foul play, for the Asika, seeing that he was about to succeed, lifted it an inch or two, so that he also missed and with a groan joined the band of the defeated.  Next appeared a fourth priest, even more horribly arrayed than those before him, but Alan noticed that his mask was of the lightest, and that his garments consisted chiefly of paint, the main idea of his make-up being that of a skeleton.  He was a thin active fellow, and all the watching thousands greeted him with a shout.  For a few seconds he stood back gazing at the mask as a wolf might at an unapproachable bone.  Then suddenly he ran forward and sprang into the air.  Such an amazing jump Alan had never seen before.  So high was it indeed that his head came level with that of the fetish, which he snatched with both hands tearing it from Asika’s grasp.  Coming to the ground again with a thud, he began to caper to and fro, kissing the mask, while the audience shouted: