Count Van Zorn coaxed Invern into a lounging chair and gave him a glass of wine. It was Port, of a quality that to the young man’s palate tasted like velvet fire. He was soon smoking a strong cigar in company with the old man, his fears quite obliterated. But his visitor noted that the Count was engrossed. As he sat, his eyes fastened upon the pattern of the polished parquet, Van Zorn looked like a man planning some grave project, perhaps a great crime. His head was hollowed at the temples, on his forehead the veins were puffy, his eyebrows, black as ink in the morning, were now interspersed with whitish-gray--the dye had worn away. At intervals he groaned snatches of melody, and once Invern heard him gabble in a strange tongue. “And the music and the magic!” broke in the young man, weary of this interval. Slowly Van Zorn arose and stared at him steadily with his bird-of-prey eyes. “Have you ever realized,” he finally began in sing-song tones, “what an instrument for good or evil is the art you profess to practise? Hear me out,” he continued, as the composer made a motion of dissent; “I don’t refer to the facile criticism which classifies some music profane, some music sacred. The weaklings who are hurt by sensual operatic music would be equally hurt by a book or a picture; I refer to the music that is a bridge between here and--over there, over there!” His voice sank as he waved his lean brown fingers toward the alcove. “In the days of old, when man was nearer to nature, nearer to the gods, music was the key to all the mysteries. Pan and Syrinx answered its magic summons. A lost art, lost with the vulgarization of the other beautiful arts, you say? I deny it!” He drew up his rickety figure as if he held the keys of a conquered city. “No! I repeat, music is still the precious art of arts and across its poisonous gulf of sound, on the other side, _over there_,”--again he pointed to the alcove, with its sable velvet funeral pall--“the gods await our homage. Wagner--a worshipper at the diabolic shrine--pictured his faith in Parsifal. He is his own Klingsor, and the music he made for the evocation of Kundry came straight from the mouth of hell. Ah! how it burns the senses! How it bites the nerves’--‘Gundryggia there, Kundry here!’ Yes, the gods and the greatest of all the gods, my master. Music is the unique spell that brings him to his worshippers on earth. We near the end of things. This planet has lived its appointed years. All the sins--_save the supreme one_--have been committed, all the virtues have bleached in vain our cowardly souls. Tell me, young man, tell me,” he grasped Oswald by his wrist, “do you long for a sight of the true master? Through the gates of music will you go with me to _my_ heaven where dwells the Only One?”