“Yet it is not any city of to-day,” he was saying. “Look, how yonder little rascal glitters—he is wearing a helmet of some sort and a gorget. Why, all those pigmies, if you look closely, go in far braver scarlets and purples than we elect to skulk about in nowadays; and there is not an office-building or an electric-light advertisement of chewing-gum in sight. No, that hotchpotch of huddled gables and parapets and towers shaped like lanterns was stolen straight out of some Doré illustration for Rabelais or _Les Contes Drolatiques_. But it does not matter at all, and it will never matter, where we may chance to be, Ettarre. What really and greatly matters, is that when I try to touch you everything vanishes.” The girl was frankly puzzled. “Yes, that seems a part of the sigil’s magic....” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ II Of the Sigil and One Use of It IT proved that this was indeed a part of the sigil’s wonder-working: Kennaston learned by experience that whenever, even by accident, he was about to touch Ettarre his dream would end like a burst bubble. He would find himself alone and staring at the gleaming fragment of metal. Before long he also learned something concerning the sigil of Scoteia, of which this piece of metal once formed a part; for it was permitted him to see the sigil in its entirety, many centuries before it was shattered: it was then one of the treasures of the Didascalion, a peculiar sort of girls’ school in King Ptolemy Physcon’s city of Alexandria, where women were tutored to honor fittingly the power which this sigil served. But it is not expedient to speak clearly concerning this; and the real name of the sigil was, of course, quite different from that which Kennaston had given it in his romance. So began an odd divided life for Felix Kennaston. At first he put his half of the sigil in an envelope, which he hid in a desk in the library, under a pile of his dead uncle’s unused bookplates; whence, when occasion served, it was taken out in order that when held so as to reflect the lamplight—for this was always necessary—it might induce the desired dream of Ettarre.