Even before he arrived at the second and steeper stairway leading to the attic he once more caught the sound of voices from that upper story. They were excited voices, shrill with ecstasy, though one seemed fuller-timbred than the other. It was this voice which he heard intone: “Lust shall not dwell in this house! This abomination has been in our house and has been a curse to us! Cleanse us, O God, of the grossness which has been thrust upon us!” and through this strange incantation the shriller voice piped: “Nor shall we fatten on nakedness and live slothfully on the fruits of sin! And she who has degraded herself before Thine eyes shall be lashed with scorpions and branded with shame!” And crowding on this came the drunken chanting of the deeper voice: “Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face that thy shame may appear. I have seen thine adulteries and thy neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom and thine abominations on the hills in the fields—and thou wilt be made clean!” Conkling, emerging from the well of the narrow stairway, stood panting and stunned. The air was thick with smoke, and for a moment or two he found it far from easy to see. But he made out two gaunt old women, disheveled and rapt, so intent on their own ends that they neither challenged nor regarded him. He saw the taller one kneeling beside the hone-white sarcophagus which stood toward the center of the attic floor. In this wide basin of marble she had built what first impressed him as a funeral pyre. Heavy coils of smoke were rising from it as she rocked her body back and forth and prayed aloud. But a vaguely familiar smell about that heavy smoke brought Conkling toward her at a bound, for his nostrils, he knew, were sniffing the odors of burning canvas impregnated with oil. But he stopped midway in his flight and ran to the far side of the room, where he knew the Titian stood. He saw there only the empty frame from which the canvas had been slashed. That took him at a leap back to the sarcophagus. As he stared down through the thick air he saw a stretch of rimpled canvas belly up with the heat of the flames beneath it. He saw the mellowed and magic ivory gold of a rounded breast swell up and burst in a darkening bubble of heat. He stooped forward with a gasp and caught at one unseared edge of the crumpled-up canvas. Then he just as quickly dropped it and wheeled about. For a repeated hissing sound, followed by a gasp that might have been an echo of his own, fell on his ears. He saw Lavinia Keswick, with her hair down, with a face like a mænad and with a crop of plaited leather in her hand. Beyond her in the blue-gray air he saw the slender white back of a girl. Her posture impressed him as singularly unnatural, until he suddenly wakened to the fact that she was tied with a cotton rope to the heavy-timbered easel in front of her. Then as he saw the mænad with the flying scant tresses raise the whip in her hand he realized what was taking place.