those witch-women; and these two having once appeared in the foreground of that Pandemonium, stood out in bold relief, distinctly outlined against the mass of fiendish faces and whirling forms, and dominated the scene. I seemed to watch them for an intolerable length of time, with sickened heart and weary eyes, weighed down by the sense of a world abandoned to the powers of darkness.

The hideous revelation of this infernal populace froze my soul. I think you know that I went to Oxford a doubter, and that I left the Varsity an unbeliever. Most of all had

I scoffed at the notion of a hell, of a personal devil, and his army of fiends. And here, face to face with this demonworld, there came upon me the appalling conviction that the dominion of Satan was a power that had existed before the beginning of time, and would rule and reign throughout eternity.

Suddenly a cloud of snow drifted across the lurid picture, and blotted it out.

My dream changed, and I was standing in a watchtower on the walls of Rome, looking down upon the sack of the city. I heard the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpets under the midnight sky, as the Salarian Gate was silently opened by a traitor's hands, and Alaric's barbarous hordes poured into the streets, with licence to sack and plunder, to ravage and kill, furious victors after a triple siege.

Like the pictured scenes in a moving panorama the horrors of that nocturnal massacre passed before my eyes; rapine, murder, the pitiless slaughter of the old and feeble; the white hairs of age, the sunny locks of childhood, dragged over the blood-bespattered stones, cruelties unspeakable; a spectacle that I cannot remember without pain, unreal though it was. And through all that labyrinth of horror one figure was predominant, the captain of a barbaric legion, in whose colossal form and satanic countenance I saw the likeness of the man I had watched in the theatre.

Other scenes followed, familiar in the history of the world, along the sequence of the centuries, scenes of terror and crime, and in all his face flashed out upon me through fire and blood, in the heart of the carnage, the embodied power of evil.

The last vision showed me a room in a Russian palace, the death-chamber of the murdered Emperor Paul; and in the band of conspirators his tall figure, superb in a general's uniform, rose pre-eminent, the murderer-in-chief.

I woke exhausted, escaping with a struggle from dreams that seemed to have held me in their ghastly spell for a long night of agony-and I heard the clock of St. James's Church strike two. I had been in bed something less than an hour, and for the greater part of that time I had been lying awake, with every prospect of a sleepless night.

I send you my dream, because you are a connoisseur and a collector of the uncanny, not because I myself attach any importance to it. I trace the vision of the desert steppe and the satanic populace to a certain passage in Gibbon, which impressed my imagination some time ago, when I took down one of his volumes and opened it at random for an hour's fireside reading. Perhaps there are few who read their Gibbon nowadays; but the book has always been a favourite of mine. I love the history of those dim centuries when Christianity and Paganism existed side by side. I love the splendour of the Eastern Empire; the grandeur of Rome, noble even in decay.

So, remembering that legend of the Scythian witches, who, banished from human companionship for their hellish practices, met and mated with the infernal powers, and became the mothers of a diabolical race, my dream is easily accounted for.

III.

ARDEN had a long conversation with Mrs. Berry on the morning after his bad dream. He withheld nothing that had come to his knowledge from the mother's ear. She had a right to know everything that concerned her daughter's peril, every circumstance, however insignificant, that would help to put her on her guard against the enemy.

"Oh, sir, what am I to do?" she asked despairingly, being one of those weak women who, having lived under a husband's control for the best part of their life, are incapable of coming to a decision in a crisis. "Oh, Mr. Arden, do help me! Save her, sir! Save my poor girl-my only child-all I have in this world to work for and to love!"

It was a difficult case. The girl could not be put under lock and key; nor could the mother watch over her with unceasing vigilance. For the mistress of a West End lodging-house there were but scanty hours of leisure; nor was the uneducated mother a companion for the halfeducated daughter. In that dingy ground-floor parlour, with no outlook but a London yard, no sounds but the drip of the cistern and the dull roar of distant wheels, the monotony of street-organs, and the maddening iteration of church-bells, youth, with its romantic longings, its vague visions of a world of beauty, somewhere, far out of reach, was eating its heart out. Arden felt an unspeakable pity for mother and daughter. It seemed to him that these middle-class parents, the strugglers and breadwinners, had made a fatal mistake in bringing up their beloved girl-child in the prison-house of a back parlour. They had reared her in ignorance of the world and its ways, in ignorance of evil; but in so doing they had stunted the growth of her mind, dwarfed the power of observation and comparison, and made her an easy victim for the seducer.

Better for her, he thought, to have suffered the rough training of a middle-class day-school, to have rubbed shoulders with the good and bad, to have been early acquainted with the manifold perils of life, the snares set for beauty, the battle of the sexes, the treachery, the cruelty, the falsehood of the strong in their dealings with the weak. On the threshold of her nineteenth birthday this girl was an infant in her ignorance of life, and the first voice that thrilled her ear, the first hand that held hers with a lover's grasp, the first lips that sought the kiss her modesty refused, while the impulse of her heart would have yielded it, were the voice and the hand and the lips of the predestined conqueror. Nothing but total separation from the pursuer could save her from perdition. Her imagination was enslaved, her will was subjugated, and she had already travelled halfway on the road to ruin.

"There is only one thing I can advise," he told Mrs. Berry. "Send your daughter away from London, in such careful custody that this man will not be able to get an interview with her, even if he finds out where she is living. Have you any relations or friends in the country whom you could trust to take care of her?"

"Yes, sir," she answered, with a troubled look; "there is Lisbeth's Aunt Tabitha, my dear husband's only sister, a single woman, and very comfortably off, who has a nice cottage near Woking."

"The very person, I should think."

"Oh, I don't know, sir. I'm afraid my poor girl wouldn't be happy with her."

"She wouldn't be happy anywhere while she is in her present frame of mind.”

"No, sir; I'm afraid not. But the country is so dull, when one has been used to the gaiety of town."

Arden thought of the smoky, stuffy back parlour with a shudder.

"And Aunt Tabitha is a hard woman. She was still-room maid, and then housekeeper, in a nobleman's family for nearly thirty years, and saved a little fortune, quite enough for her to live independent for the rest of her days. She keeps a servant, and has everything nice about her. Indeed, her cottage is a perfect picture; but then there

is hardly a

chimney within half a mile. She hasn't the smuts to contend with, as we have in St. James's."

"You don't think she would be unkind to your daughter ?" "No, sir; I do not. She is very fond of Lisbeth. Lisbeth is her goddaughter; but we could not bring ourselves to call her Tabitha. She'd be very kind to my girl in her way -but it's not like my way."

"And you know of no one else to whom you could trust your daughter?"

"No, sir; there is no one else. And you really think I ought to send my girl away?"

"Most certainly-if you can place her with some one who will keep a close watch upon her. Remember, there is no doubt as to her danger; danger from this man; danger from her own state of mind. She will be safer anywhere than in this house; but wherever she is, she must be watched and guarded; guarded from her own romantic impulses, and from this man's unscrupulous pursuit."

"You don't know who he is, sir, or anything about him?" "I know nothing about him now, except that he is a dangerous man. But I hope soon to find out a good deal more." "I hope you will, sir. It will be some help."

"The help must come from you, Mrs. Berry, and from your determination to save your child."

"I'll write to Tabitha this morning, sir, directly I've done my marketing. Lisbeth didn't sleep five minutes all last night. I was only sleeping a dog-sleep myself, and could hear that poor child tossing about-she has her little bed in my room, you know, sir-and this morning she looks as white as a ghost. It's heart-breaking. We used to be so happy together."

"Till womanhood came, and she had a heart to break," thought Arden.

Walter Arden knew his sister's habits, and that his best chance of finding her at home was after five o'clock, at which hour her friends-"pals," as she called them-dropped in for tea and gossip, to discuss the last scandal, or the newest dressmaker, or the book which everybody was talking about and very few people were reading, second-hand and thirdhand, and fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-hand opinions being