“But you, you!” Ferval cried unsteadily.  “Why must your life be sacrificed to gratify the bizarre egotism of such a—­” He cut short the phrase, fearful of wounding her.  He felt her body tremble and her arm contract.  They reached the marble staircase of the Jeanne d’Arc memorial.  She stopped him and burst forth:—­

“Would you be willing to share his burden?  Would you take upon your shoulders his sin?  He may have committed the one unpardonable sin, for he discovered the true philosopher’s stone, that can transmute metals, make mountains nod, the stars to stop, and command the throne of Jehovah—­oh, what blasphemy has been his in his daring music!  If he could persuade one other soul besides mine to help him, he might be released from his woe.  Will you be that other?”

She put this question as if she were proposing a commonplace human undertaking.  Ferval in his confusion fancied that she was provoking him to a declaration.  To grasp his receding reason he fatuously exclaimed:—­

“Is this a Salvation Army fantasy?”

With that she called out, in harsh resentment: 

“Not salvation for you!”

She then thrust him from her so violently that he tumbled backward down the steps to the very bottom, where, unnerved by the ferocity of the attack and his head bruised by the fall, he felt his consciousness escape like gas from a punctured balloon.  When found the next morning, he was barely covered by the old sin-eater’s rags, while near by was scattered the entire orchestra of that eloquent wizard.  Shudderingly he realized that it had been no dream; shudderingly he wondered if upon his soul had been shifted the unknown crime of the fanatic!  The witching, enigmatic Debora haunted his memory; and with dismay he recalled the blistering vision evoked by the music, through which she had glided like some tremulous Lamia.  Decidedly his imagination had carried him far.  He cursed his easy credulity, he reviled his love of the exotic....

Ferval made inquiry of the authorities, but received little comfort.  Salvation Army people they were not, this father and daughter; the tambourine, assumed garb, and prophet’s beard had deceived him.  Impostors!  But of what incredible caliber, of what illusion-creating power!  For years he could not see a Salvation Army girl without a sense of cerebral exaltation.  If he could have met Debora again, he would have forgiven her sibylline deceptions, her father’s chicanery.  And how did they spin their web?  Ferval, student of the occult, greedy of metaphysical problems, at first set it down to Indian Yogi magic.  But the machinery—­the hideously discordant human orchestra, the corybantic dancing!  No, he rejected the theory.  Music is sometimes hypnotic, but not such music; dancing is the most alluring of the spatial arts, and Debora’s miming was a delight to the eye; but could it have so obscured his judgments as to paint upon the canvas of his fancy those prodigious frescoes of time and space?