“Browning,” she softly mused, “and life.” The plot thickened, the harmony grew denser--a musical palimpsest lay before them, and as they strove to unweave its meaning they shuddered at the gulf. Weary and panting in spirit they stared askance and questioned the future. “Not that,” the music implored. Then burst that delicious cascade of silvery scales. They coruscated, they foamed, they boiled with melodic laughter. It seemed as if God was with the world and he and she heard the lark trilling to the dawn as hand in hand they mounted in their dizzy flight. Their naked, unabashed souls groped in the azure and they carolled that song which is as old as eternity. They fell through space into fathomless twilight, and the piano sang the echo-like refrain of the first motif. It was the swan-song of their hopes. The heavy-scented night spoke softly to their hearts; a nightingale dimly piped in the distance, and with velvety clangor the music ceased. He remained at the piano. She rose. Without were odors and starlight. The two drank each other’s gaze with the thirst of lost souls. Then she went into the night, and the other one, staring at the tuberoses, heard their perfumed murmur: “Renounce thou shalt; thou shalt renounce.” VII THE VISION MALEFIC “To be in Heaven the second, he disdains: So now the first in Hell and flames he reigns, Crown’d once with joy and light: crown’d now with fire and pains.” --_Phineas Fletcher_ (1582). I am not a diabolist. I was an agnostic until ... I have read Huysmans and I do not believe he ever saw half he describes. Yet I, and in commonplace America, have seen things, have heard things, that would make mad the group of Parisian occultists. I dislike publicity, but Vance Thompson has asked me to relate the story, and so I mean to give it, names and all, with the faint hope that it may serve as a warning to callow astrologists, and all the younger generation affected by the writings of impious men who deny the existence of the devil.