“Transform, transform!” she cried again, her voice rising like a song.  “Rub well your skin before you fly.  Come!  Come with me to the Sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its evil worship!  See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments prepared.  The Throne is occupied.  Anoint and come!  Anoint and come!”

She grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night.  He too began to change swiftly.  Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all that is good.

A wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy.

“Satan is there!” she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw him with her to the edge of the wall.  “Satan has come.  The Sacraments call us!  Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!”

Just saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but mastered him.  He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he shrieked again.  It was the old impulses, the old awful habits instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and were intelligible.  It was the ancient call.  And it was heard below.  It was answered.

The wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley.  The crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer.  Strokes of wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top of the stone wall; and Ilse clung to him with her long shining arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck.  But not Ilse alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air.  The pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.

“Anoint and away!  Anoint and away!” they cried in wild chorus about him.  “To the Dance that never dies!  To the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil!”

Another moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him, when—­so can a small thing after the whole course of an adventure—­he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below.  But he fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.