A few days more and he had ceased to speak. He muttered now and then, for no particular reason whatever, but his wet lips formed no words. Sometimes he gazed at her as she moved about, but in his eyes was no question as to what she might be doing; the motion of her body simply had attracted him momentarily and aroused a flicker of interest. But it would pass at once, and again he would let his head go forward, and sit gazing at the ground, while his tongue hung out and dripped. Meanwhile it snowed. The ground was covered two feet deep about the cave. Up in the higher altitudes the blizzards raged perpetually, and the air was filled with dismal moanings. All hope of Dr. Shonto’s returning to the Valley of Arcana, except in an aeroplane, had vanished. And the idiot sat at the door of the Cave of Hypocritical Frogs and drooled, staring through his hanging hair! Never before had Charmian Reemy known fear, but now she suffered abject terror. All about her was ice and snow, and she shivered when a new note came in the monotonous roar of the waterfall. No longer sang the silver-throated choir boys. The high-pitched chorus that her fancy had once named theirs became the sinfully gleeful giggling of malicious sprites as they triumphed over her great disaster. The rollicking songs that the male quartet had sung changed to the bellowing of Satan, as when the angel of the Lord came down from heaven with the key to the bottomless pit and chained him for a thousand years. Wrapped in her blankets, nightmares came to her so that she was afraid to sleep without the flickering light of a pine knot near her. Often she awoke screaming, gripped by an icy, throat-contracting fear. And once the nightmare took upon itself reality--and Madame Destrehan’s prophecy was fulfilled. There were fingers at her throat, long, curving talons that were black with dirt. Maniacal eyes looked into hers through a screen of hanging hair. Wet lips were close to her face, seen through a mat of unkempt beard, and from them lolled a tongue, black and swollen. She thought that she fainted--she did not know. But for a space of time--how great she never knew--the flickering pine-knot torch was gone and an icy wave swept over her. Then she was up, shrieking, struggling madly, hers the strength of half a dozen women. She hurled the ogre away from her, striking, clawing, pushing, and it crashed against a wall of the cave and sank to the floor in a disorderly heap. Panting, one hand clutching her breast, she gazed at it, huddled there, inert, breathing asthmatically. Then it moved, half rose, reclined once more in a posture more human and natural.