“May divert My Majesty from complaint of them, you mean. Yet I suppose that they, as well as you, should have that proverbial last chance due evil intenders. By no means make any diverting shade await my displeasure. Page, bid them enter The Presence.” Royal tolerance fled, however, at sight of the candidates. “A crippled old soldier and a woman with a suckling babe! It behooves me to find some way of revising the current notion of what constitutes My Majesty’s diversion.” He relapsed into silence as the new-comers were half led, half dragged toward the dais by a pair of the scrub-oak dwarfs who ushered inside the Gehennan gates. By light of the dynamo that is within each soul, they were clothed as in the habiliments they had worn in their late estate on earth, he in a rusty uniform, she in nun’s gray. With his crutch the cripple resented their intent to be rough, but his travel-mate stumbled forward without resistance, her head drooped so low that her long, loose hair swaddled the whimpering infant shade in her arms. The kingly choler increased when, at the steps, she sank as though from exhaustion rather than reverence to her knees. One last, promising glare he shot at Old Original and the seven, then spoke in a voice quiet, yet more dire to those who knew him than any thunder-clap. “To swoon, madam or miss, is out of date down here. I pray you postpone the attempt for some less sophisticated audience.” Sin, leaning forward from his especial chair just back of the throne, dared to insinuate: “And I pray you, Damnity, do not sentence her until you have considered her. There is something exceptional about her. She may have been sent to prove that idea of mine.” Satan scorned to notice the suggestion. “Come,” he ordered the woman soul, “show your passport.” As though from shame, she crumpled against her breast a scarlet slip. Shaking back her hair, she looked up at him. His Highness, startled, returned her look. He did not heed or hear Sin’s gasp of anticipation. He forgot the seven, the pages and the dwarfs. Leaning lower, he looked and looked. Truly he, who had been the fate of most fair women since Eve, never had beheld one of a face of such appeal. CHAPTER II The multiple-candle glow from the Mephistophelian coat-of-arms lit the girl-soul’s features. From a veil that well might have been worn on Earth for mourning, so black was her hair and enveloping, they gleamed as if carved from Parian marble. The curve of her chin, the fullness of lips blent into faint, downward-traced lines, the tube-rose texture of her cheeks, all lent a suggestion of pliancy, even weakness. Above, her classic nose and broad forehead offered contradiction--were sculped as from a master’s inspiration.