“I see nothing,” she cried, with a shrill, defiant laugh; “I am going in”--and before I could stop her, she had run into the middle of the room and was standing still in the bar of sunlight, with her arms outspread like wings, and her face, the lips apart, lifted with an expression on it of eager inquiry. What happened? I can find an image only in the poison bottle of the entomologist. As some shining, flower-stained butterfly, slipped into this glass coffin, quivers, droops its wings and fades, as it were, in a moment before its capturer’s eyes, so Zyp faded before mine. Her arms dropped to her sides, her figure seemed as if its whole buoyancy were gone at a touch, her face fell to a waxen color and “Oh, take me away!” she wailed in a thin, strangled voice. I conquered my terror, rushed to her, and, dragging her stumbling and tripping from the room, banged to the door behind us and made for the little platform once more and the open air. She revived in a wonderfully short space of time, and, lifting up her head, looked into my eyes with her own wide with dismay. “It was hideous,” she whispered; “why didn’t you stop me?” Zyp, it will be seen, was not all elf. She had something in common with her sex. “I warned you,” I said, “and I know what you felt.” “It was as if a question was being asked of me,” she said, in a low voice. “And yet no one spoke and there was no question. I don’t know what it wanted or what were the words, for there were none; but I feel as if I shall have to go on thinking of the answer and struggling to find it forever and ever.” “Yes,” I whispered, in the same tone; “that is what everybody says.” She begged me not to follow her, and crept away quite humbled and subdued, and we none of us saw more of her that day. But just as she left me she turned and whispered in awe-stricken tone, “Answer what speaks to thee,” and I could not remember when and where I had heard these words before. CHAPTER IV. ZYP BEWITCHES. In the evening Dr. Crackenthorpe paid us a visit. He found my father out, but elected to sit with us and smoke his pipe expectant of the other’s return. He always treated us boys as if we were so much dirt, and we respected his strength just sufficiently to try no pranks on him in the absence of the ruling power. But nevertheless we resented his presumption of authority, and whenever he sat with us alone made an exaggerated affectation of being thick in whispered confidences among ourselves. Zyp was still upstairs and the doctor had not as yet seen her, but he was conscious, I think, in some telepathic way, of an alien presence in the house, for he kept shifting his position uneasily and looking toward the door. A screech from his lips suddenly startled us, and we turned round to see the long man standing bolt upright, with his face gone the color of a meal sack, and his bold eyes staring prominent. “What’s the matter?” said Jason. Gradually the doctor’s face assumed a dark look of rage.