“Ah, but you must not blame Ole-Luk-Oie,” he protested. “It is all the fault of Beatricê Cenci....” Then Kennaston knew he had unwittingly spoken magic words, for at once, just as he had seen it done in theaters, the girl’s face was shown him clearly in a patch of roseate light. It was the face of Ettarre. “Things happen so in dreams,” he observed. “I know perfectly well I am dreaming, as I have very often known before this that I was dreaming. But it was always against some law to tell the people in my nightmares I quite understood they were not real people. To-day in my daydream, and here again to-night, there is no such restriction; and lovely as you are, I know that you are just a daughter of sub-consciousness or of memory or of jumpy nerves or, perhaps, of an improperly digested entrée.” “No, I am real, Horvendile—but it is I who am dreaming you.” “I had not thought to be a part of any woman’s dream nowadays.... Why do you call me Horvendile?” She who bore the face of Ettarre pondered momentarily; and his heart moved with glad adoration. “Now, by the beard of the prophet! I do not know,” the girl said, at last. “The name means nothing to you?” “I never heard it before. But it seemed natural, somehow—just as it did when you spoke of Ole-Luk-Oie and Beatricê Cenci.” “But Ole-Luk-Oie is the lord and master of all dreams, of course. And that furtive long-dead Roman girl has often troubled my dreams. When I was a boy, you conceive, there was in my room at the first boarding-house in which I can remember dieting, a copy of the Guido portrait of Beatricê Cenci—a copy done in oils, a worthless daub, I suppose. But there was evil in the picture—a lurking devilishness, which waited patiently and alertly until I should do what that silent watcher knew I was predestined to do, and, being malevolent, wanted me to do. I knew nothing then of Beatricê Cenci, mark you, but when I came to learn her history I thought the world was all wrong about her. That woman was evil, whatever verse-makers may have fabled, I thought for a long while.... To-day I believe the evil emanated from the person who painted that particular copy. I do not know who that person was, I never shall know. But the black magic of that person’s work was very potent.” And Kennaston looked about him now, to find fog everywhere—impenetrable vapors which vaguely showed pearl-colored radiancies here and there, but no determinable forms of trees or of houses, or of anything save the face of Ettarre, so clearly discerned and so lovely in that strange separate cloud of roseate light. “Ah, yes, those little magics”—it was the girl who spoke—“those futile troubling necromancies that are wrought by portraits and unfamiliar rooms and mirrors and all time-worn glittering objects—by running waters and the wind’s persistency, and by lonely summer noons in forests—how inconsequently they fret upon men’s heart-strings!”