With mystic gestures she beckons the knight, he launches a boat and the waves rise white and threatening amid a storm of music from the orchestra, while overhead the thunder rolls and the lightning flashes. The boat reaches the rock, strikes, and in a moment the knight is struggling in the water with hands stretched out imploringly to the Water Witch. Darkness once more, then again the emerald light shines, showing the Halls of the Lorelei, who stands over the dead body of the knight, while around swing the river nymphs with floating hair and waving hands, then the shrill piping of the Lorelei _motif_ sounds once more and the curtain falls. "Well, what do you think of the ballet?" asked Beaumont, who had returned to the box and was watching with keen interest the dreamy look upon the young man's face. "I think it is charming," replied Reginald, in whose head the mysterious melody of the Lorelei was still ringing, "but what a fool that knight was." "Ah, do you think so?" rejoined the artist, lightly. "There I do not agree with you. Many a man has had his life wrecked by listening to the music of the Sea Witch. The legend of the Lorelei is simply an allegory of life." "So is the legend of the Sirens, I suppose," said Blake listlessly. "Of course the man who is drawn away from Nature by the alluring voice of the world always loses his happiness and genius." "I don't think much of your world's singing," retorted Blake, a trifle cynically. "It would never allure me." "It's alluring you now," thought Beaumont, although he did not say so, but merely remarked, "Too much of modern sentimentality about it, perhaps, or you think the world's voice pipes too vulgar a ditty. There I agree with you, but, unfortunately, in this age we vulgarise everything; we drag forth the lovely mysterious dreams of mediævalism from their enchanted twilights into the broad blaze of day and then reject them in disgust because we are disillusionized. Ah, bah' the world of to-day, which reduces everything to plain figures, always puts me in mind of a child spoiling a drum to find out what's inside." "Unpleasant, but true." "The truth is always unpleasant my friend, that is why people so seldom tell it," said Beaumont, "but listen to this recitation, it's the best thing of the evening." The reciter was a celebrated actress who had been induced to appear upon the music-hall platform by way of an experiment, to see if the ordinary audience of such a place would take to the higher form of art as exemplified by the recitation.