The music travelled to the ears of his audience with a difference: or so it seemed to them, as they stood before the booth. Some heard in it, through the discordant hubbub of the fair, the rattle of vehicles and the tramp of feet in the busy thoroughfares of a great city; for others, it was the whistling of birds in the hedgerows; and to some, like the restless pulsations of the sea. To each, according to his memories and his mood. But the music of the Showman was a single tune for all. "Walk up! walk up!" bawled the grey-coated Showman, blowing at the pipes and pounding on the drum. "Darned if I wouldn't go in, if I had the brass!" quoth a lean, unshaven, shabby-looking man, who stood in front of the booth with his hands in his pockets. "I'll stand treat, if you like!" cried a sunken-eyed young woman, whose cheap and much-bedraggled finery matched aptly enough with her wan and haggard countenance. It was the impulse of a moment, but she was the puppet of impulse and danced on the wires at the slightest touch of chance. "Right you are!" cried the man. And they mounted the steps together. "It's like going up to the altar, isn't it?" giggled the woman to her companion. "More like going up to the gallows," growled the man. The Showman rattled the coins as he pocketed them, and flinging aside the canvas admitted them to the booth. The interior was enveloped in a dim obscurity; hardly deep enough to be counted as darkness, but oppressive enough to slow the pulses of both. There was, however, at one end of the booth a large disc projected on the obscurity: a pale, empty, weirdly-lighted circle, which they stared at dumbly, with wonder in their eyes. "Is this some darned fool's joke?" growled the man. "Hush!" said the woman, "the entertainment has commenced." And, true enough, the disc at which they had been staring had already a stirring, as of life, across its surface. They were aware of a couple of enthralling faces fronting them side by side on the disc. One was a woman's face, exquisitely beautiful, with soft blue eyes, full of the most charming gaiety, and with lips as sweetly winsome as a child's: the other was a man's face, proud and handsome, the mouth set firmly, the eyes full of thought. "Such a face I had dreamed of as my own," sighed the woman. "So I had imagined I might have been," mused the man. And then the scenes on the disc began to wax and dwindle rapidly; like the momentary clinging, and as rapid vanishing, of breath across a mirror of polished steel. There was a vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy efflux of the same.