“I must look the part I am going to play.” “But we are going back. Lord Sombrewater has decided.” He spoke with great earnestness. “Are we? Not quite yet perhaps.” She concealed her meaning, giving him great distress. They sat together in the wide window, on a ledge of pale yellow tiles. The poet eyed her long and dreamily; sometimes (through dreaming) his knee touched hers, or his hand, if he spoke, found it necessary to pat her fingers or her shoulder. The innocence of the poet permitted itself some intimacies. But they woke no thrill in her. She only leaned out and caressed the close ivy, or gazed up at the swifts circling over a group of elms in the midst of the bamboo. “The dress is alien, but it is enchanting,” he said, after a pause. “It falls about you like an amber spell.” “Paint me,” she replied. “I came to be painted, as promised.” He obeyed. “I believe it is a spell,” he went on. “You are under a spell, woven on you by your Chinese. The robe has definitely altered your aura.” “Is that the case? Tell me, has Yuan got an aura?” “As far as I can discover,” said Terence, with the air of making a mysterious confidence, “he has got practically nothing else.” “You mean—no body?” “No corporeal habitation at all—not to speak of. Does that interest you? Is it a point of any importance?” But she was watching the swifts, and only threw out an aside: “You must write an article, ‘The Influence of Environment on the Aura.’” “But it is profound, I can tell you—in fact, it is disconcerting. I cannot understand these people. It is all part and parcel of the mysterious, sinister unresponsiveness of the place. I am unhappy here.” His grey eyes were mournful. “I sit all day without any illumination, unvisited by any messenger from those mysterious worlds that touch so closely on ours. The astral plane is quite closed to me.” “Something has gone wrong with the trapdoor,” she ventured, unsympathetically. “Unvisited by anyone,” he added, with meaning. But she was absorbed in the gliding swifts. “I believe some evil spirit on the Other Side has done this by way of a joke. Those three friends of yours, Lychnis, are elementals, vampires.” “It was you brought us here,” she threw out, with her eyes on the sky. “The Peach-blossom People—pink feet, I remember.” “It was to punish me for some error. They have brought me here and blown out the candle of my vision. I cannot contemplate. My harp and my tongue are silent; my hand is paralysed. And now the word descends on me in the mists of morning that I must arise and go back to Ireland. Everything is so designed and so finished, so dead; and I find your friends so on top of life, so beyond the capacity to feel the world’s sorrow, so smug.”