At last the dread shadow was looming across his path. An undefined awe crept over him, such as dark chasms instill; an awe at his own self. He would fain have been screened from his own substance. By degrees he welcomed the tidings with a dark rapture. In himself lay the substance of Evil. It was not the Angel of Light that ruled the reeling universe. It was the shadow of Eblis looming dark and terrible over the lives of men. Long before he had ever guessed what rills of flaming Phlegethon ran riot in his veins, had he not felt his pulses swell with joy at human pain, had he not played the fiend untaught? Could not the Fiend, as well as God, live incarnate in human clay? Was not the earth the meeting ground of Heaven and Hell? And why should not he, Basil, defying Heaven, be Hell's incarnation?-- Ay--but the day of death and the day of reckoning! Would his parentage entail eternal fire, or princely power and sway in the dark vaults of nameless terror? Should he quail or thrill with awful exaltation? "And--in return for that which I offer up--King of the dark red glare--will you give to me what I crave--boundless power and the woman for which my soul is on fire?" "Have you the courage to snatch them from the talons of Fate?" came back the gibbering reply. A blinding flash of lightning was succeeded by an appalling crash of thunder. "From Hell itself!" shrieked Basil frenzied. "Give me Theodora and I will fill the cup of torture that I have seized on your shadowy altars, and quaff your health at the terrific banquet board of Evil in toasts of torment--in wine of boundless pain!" In the quickly succeeding flashes of lightning the dark form seemed to rise and to expand. "I knew you would not fail me! Come!" For a moment Basil hesitated, fingering the hilt of his poniard. "Where would you lead me?" he queried, his tone far from steady. "How many of these twilights must I traverse before I see him whom you serve?" "That you shall know to-night!" In the deep and frozen silence which succeeded the terrible peals of thunder their retreating footsteps died to silence in the labyrinthine galleries of the Emperor's Tomb. Only the dog-headed Anubis seemed to stare and nod mysteriously. CHAPTER III THE CRYSTAL SPHERE Outwardly and in daylight there was nothing noticeable about the sixth house in the Lane of the Sclavonians in Trastevere beyond the fact that it was a dwelling of a superior kind to those immediately surrounding it, which were chiefly ill-favored cottages of fishermen and boatmen, and had about it an air of almost sombre retirement.