"Else were I not the man to compel fate to do my bidding," responded the Grand Chamberlain. "Fear can have no part in the compact which binds us. I have live things under my feet that clog my steps and grow more stubborn day by day."-- "Deem you, you can keep your footing in the black lobbies of hell?" gibbered the cowled form. "For you will need all your courage, if you would reach the goal!" Basil, for a moment, faced his shadowy interlocutor in silence. There was a darker light in his eyes when he spoke. "Give me but that which my soul desires and I shall run the gauntlet unflinchingly. I shall brace my courage to the dread experiment." A fierce gust of wind shook the cypresses and holm oaks into shuddering anxiety. "You are about to embark upon an enterprise more perilous than any man now living has ever ventured upon," spoke the cowled form. "Your soul will travel through the channels, through which the red and fiery tide rolls up when the volcano wakes. Each time it wakes the lava washes over the lost souls, which, chained to rings in the black rock, glow like living coals, but leaves them whole, to undergo their fate anew. Do you persist?" "Give me what I desire--" "Ay--so say they all--but to grovel in the dust before the Unknown Presence which they have defied." "Who are you to taunt me with a fear my soul knows not?" Basil turned to the black-robed form, stretching out his hand as if to touch his mantle. A magnetic current passed through his limbs that caused him to drop his arm with a cry of pain. Forked lightnings leaped from one cloud-bank to another. Distant thunder growled and died among the hills. "I have seen the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. I was present at the destruction of the Holy City by the legions of Titus, I witnessed the burning of Rome by Nero and the fall of the temple of Serapis. I stood upon Mount Calvary under the shadow of the world's greatest tragedy." The voice of the speaker died to silence. Basil's hand went to his head, as if he wished to assure himself whether he was awake or in the throes of some mad dream. It is a narrow boundary line, that divides the two great realms of sanity and madness. And the limits are as restless as those of two countries divided from each other by a network of shifting rivers. What belonged to the one overnight may belong to the other to-morrow. An overmastering dread had seized upon Basil at the speech of the uncanny apparition. Was not he, too, pushing his excursions now into the one realm, now into the other? And who would know in which of the two to seek for him? "Have you indeed wandered upon earth ever since those days?" he stammered, once more slave to his superstition. The apparition nodded. "I have drunk deep from the black wells of despair. I have raised the shadowy altars of him who was cast out of the heavens, higher and higher, till they almost touch the throne of the Father." "Your master then is Lucifer--"