The wind screamed round about her with the sound of many voices; far off arose a tumult as of many people running; borne on the wind came a torrent of hideous sound, not mad music, but awful dissonance, swiftly nearing, suddenly checked: after the clamor a silence like death; the room was fantastically still. Margot clung to the foot of the crucifix. “_Pourquoi, O Dieu, rejettes-tu?_” she asked in a voice grown shriveled and thin. She crouched a moment, motionless, her head on one side, listening. There was no reply. Heaven maintained its brassy silence. Her face went gray; her eyes were hard as stones; she turned her back on the crucifix, saying, “I will call upon You no more!” There was a queer shuffling sound as of footsteps in the entry. The candles sank to dull blue sparks devoid of radiance; yet, instead of darkness there was light. Outside was darkness, vast, pitmirk; inside, appalling light. All the place was stunned and blinded by an overwhelming light which cast no shadows anywhere, but, vehemently streaming, searched crack and cranny; not a crevice escaped. It lapped and flowed like waves, and penetrated everything; even the gross material of the walls, saturated by that flame, gave back a superfluous glow, a white excess of light, and every pointed thing within the room was peaked and capped with flame. Round and round the room a bewildered host of moths in little wavering flights and drops went fluttering, with a light rustle of powdery wings, and, among them, bats splashed through the light with a low, continuous whirr. Round and round, like froth-clots on flood-water swinging around a vortex, whirled slantbat and moth in a dizzy, irregular ring, in the midst of which, crouched in a high-backed chair, sat a shriveled, dead-alive, mummy-like figure, as thin and fleshless as a skeleton,--an apparition, sinister, white, and wasted as a corpse new-risen from the grave. Its chin upon its folded hands, its hands about one knee, the knee upheld by the heel crooked at the chair-seat’s edge, the other gaunt leg dangling across the upraised foot, the specter smiled on Margot a bleak, Saturnine smile. Its face was greatly wasted; all the life of it seemed gathered into the brilliant, terrible eyes, which blazed with infernal light, in splendid scorn, without remorse, sardonical; a countenance such as God alone endures to look upon unmoved; a figure terrible.... Deity, deformed, might look like this, grotesquely majestical, hideous, baleful, glorious, accursed, malign; an archangel, fallen, outcast, depraved: Satan, god of the discontent. A twisted smile wreathing his evil lips, with his chin hooked over his hands,--a smile of cool confidence mingled with nonchalance, “Why not try me?” he said. * * * * *