"You, who speak so learnedly of magic and sorcery," I retorted, smiling under cover of the darkness, "have you never heard of the white magic conjured by a tress of hair, a perfume ball, and a voice sweeter than the perfume? An image of wax does not melt before a witch's fire so easily as a man before these things." "My hair pleased you?" she questioned naively. "Or so easily as a woman melts before admiration!" I supplemented. "I am delighted to prove you human, mystic lady. Please me? Could anyone fail to be pleased with that most magnificent braid? But how can either you or I forgive the cruelty that took it from its owner? Why did you cut it off?" "So little of it! And I did not know you, then." "Little? That braid?" "It reached below my knee, now it is but little less," she answered with indifference. "We all have such hair." I gasped. My imagination painted the picture of all that shining richness enwrapping a slim young body. It was fantastic beyond belief to sit there at my desk, beneath my fingers the tools of sober, workaday life, and stare into the dark room that held the reality of my vision. She was there, but I could not rise and find her. She was opposite my eyes, but my promise forbade me to touch the lamp and see her. "Who are 'we'?" I slowly followed her last sentence. A sigh answered me. On the silence, a memory floated to me of the story she had told while I held her prisoner that first night: "_The woman sits in her low chair. The fire-shine is bright in her eyes and in her hair. On either side, her hair flows down to the floor._" Yes, by legend young witches had such hair; sylphs, undines and all of the airy race of Lilith. I thrust absurdities away from me and offered a quotation to fill the pause: "'I met a lady in the meads' 'Full beautiful; a faery's child.' 'Her hair was long, her foot was light,' 'And her eyes were wild.'" She did not laugh, or put away the suggestion. When I had decided that she did not mean to reply, and was seeking my mind for new speech to detain her with me, she finally spoke what seemed another quotation: "'A spirit--one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom Josephus and Michael Psellus of Constantinople may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.' Have you read the writings of the learned Jew or of the Platonist, you who are so very bold?" "Neither," I meekly admitted. "But neither ancient gentleman could convince me that you are unhuman." Her answer was just audible: "Not I--but, It!" Now I was silenced, for dreadful and uncanny was that whisper in the dark to a man who had met here in this room What I had met. "Tell me more of this Thing without a name," I urged, mastering my reluctance to evoke even the idea of what the blood curdled to recall. "Why does It hate me?"