At the moment when he entered, the black girl was just disappearing through what appeared to be a small door opening out of the room upon the landing of the stairs, and ordinarily concealed by the sweeping drapery of dark cloth that was looped around the entire apartment. Whether the attendant was carrying away any of the properties that might have been used in the late jugglery, he had, of course, no means of judging. The sorceress herself, at the moment when he broke in upon her, was apparently advancing from the little table at which she had been standing, partially within the sweep of the hangings, towards the dividing curtain. At sight of the intruder she stopped suddenly and drew her tall form to its full height, while such a flash of anger appeared to dart from her keen eyes as would have produced a sensible effect on any man less used to varying sensations than the cosmopolitan journalist. "What do you want?" she asked, and the words came from her lips with the same short hissing tone that he so well remembered, creating the impression that there must be a serpent hidden somewhere in the throat and hissing through what would otherwise be the voice. "What sorcery have you practised upon that poor girl, to drive her into this state of distraction, red fiend?" was the answering question, bold enough in seeming, though Tom Leslie, asked in regard to the matter to-day, would undoubtedly acknowledge that he had felt far less tremor when under the heaviest play of the Russian cannon at Inkermann, than when throwing this sharp taunt into the teeth of the sorceress. "Nothing but what _you_ have seen and endured!" was the reply, made in the same tone as before. "I have shown them the truth, and the truth is terrible. It is murder and ruin in their own households--it is battle and death around those they love--it is desolation and destruction to the land! Go!--those who cannot witness my power without blenching, should never seek me; and _you_ blench like those sick girls--I have seen you blench before?" "Seen _me_?" echoed Leslie. "Seen _you_!" was the fierce reply of the sorceress. "Fool! do you think I cannot penetrate that thin disguise--that old man's hair and those false wrinkles? You were younger-looking, eighteen months since, in another land where the eagle screams less but tears its enemies more deeply with its talons!" "I _was_," answered Leslie, carried beyond himself. "I remember the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, and I acknowledge your fearful power, though I know not if it comes from heaven or hell! But tell me--who are _you_, so magnificently beautiful, and yet so--so--" and here (a rare thing for him,) the voice of Tom Leslie faltered. "So horribly hideous, you would say," broke in the sorceress. "Stay! you have said one word that touches the woman within me. You have recognized my beauty as well as my terror. Look for one instant at what no mortal eye has seen for years or may ever see again! Look!"