In fact, the depths of the crystal were suddenly inhabited. A throng of tiny figures, men and women, surged, broke up, flocked together again in high excitement, arms waving in the air. Over their heads other figures leaned out from the upper windows of a row of more distant houses--evidently the scene was a public square--and waved also in diminutive enthusiasm. Their costumes seemed like fancy dress--men in long, bright-coloured coats with enormous lapels and tight-fitting trousers with broad stripes of some contrasting colour--women in high-waisted dresses and poke bonnets or no bonnets at all--men and women, and these the greater number, the dominant majority of the crowd, in the nondescript vestments of squalid, ugly poverty. The better-dressed men and women wore prominently, all of them, a cockade or rosette of red, white, and blue. The crowd packed close together in a common impulse, was agitated by a common emotion that set a forest of arms waving above their heads and contorted their faces in cries that were inaudible. Something was happening in that square--something that evoked fierce passion--invisible behind the densely serried mob whose backs alone could be seen. “Look!” breathed the girl in the chair. “Look!--that poor girl!” There was a curious accent of vivid sympathy in the whispered ejaculation. A young girl was forcing her way through the throng, her face covered in her hands, her shoulders shaking with sobs, weeping convulsively in a paroxysm of despair. The crowd, intent on the spectacle beyond, parted and made way for her automatically. “Oh,” murmured the girl in the chair, “I feel so funny--I feel I want to cry, too--as if a terrible calamity had suddenly come upon me--a frightful danger to someone I loved----” She shuddered, “oh, it’s awful!--it numbs me--it’s--it’s as if I felt what _she_ was feeling!” The girl in the vision took her hands from her face, looked about her with eyes of wild misery. “My God, Helen!” whispered the man in the chair, in a thrill of excitement. “_It’s you!_” “Shh!” she breathed, gazing intently into the magic scene. The air about them seemed mysteriously charged with tumultuous passion, with the inaudible vociferations of that surging mob. To both, it seemed as though they were in contact with a real crowd, beset by the vague, fierce emotions that gather and roll in the collective, primitive soul of humanity in congregation. It set their hearts to a quicker beat, bewildered their brains with unheard clamours.