The Professor went on pouring into the bowl.  He added an odour distilled out of dream-roses, three drops from the gall-bladder of a fabulous beast, and a little dust that had been man.  More too he added, so that my reader might wonder were I to tell him all; yet it is not so easy to free our spirits from the gross grip of our bodies.  Wonder not then, my reader, if the Professor exerted strange powers.  And all the while Morano was picking at a nail that fastened on the handle to his frying-pan.

And just as the last few mysteries were shaken into the bowl,—­and there were two among them of which even Asia is ignorant,—­just as the dews were blended with the powers in a grey-green sinister harmony, Morano untwisted his nail and got the handle loose.

The Professor kindled the mixture in the bowl; again green flame arose, again that voice of his began to call to their spirits, and its beauty and the power of its spell were as of some fallen angel.  The spirit of Rodriguez was nearly passing helplessly forth again on some frightful journey, when Morano losed his scabbard and sword from its girdle and tied the handle of his frying-pan across it a little below the hilt with a piece of string.  Across the table the Professor intoned his spell, across a narrow table, but it seemed to come from the far side of the twilight, a twilight red and golden in long layers, of an evening wonderfully long ago.  It seemed to take its music out of the lights that it flowed through and to call Rodriguez from immediately far away, with a call which it were sacrilege to refuse, and anguish even, and hard toil such as there was no strength to do.  And then Morano held up the sword in its scabbard with the handle of the frying-pan tied across.  Rodriguez, disturbed by a stammer in the spell, looked up and saw the Professor staring at the sword where Morano held it up before his face in the green light of the flame from the bowl.  He did not seem like a fallen angel now.  His spell had stopped.  He seemed like a professor who had forgotten the theme of his lecture, while the class waits.  For Morano was holding up the sign of the cross.

“You have betrayed me!” shouted the Slave of Orion:  the green flame died, and he strode out of the room, his purple cloak floating behind him.

“Master,” Morano said, “it was always good against magic.”

The sword was loose in the scabbard as Rodriguez took it back; there was no longer a current of magic gripping the steel.

A little uneasily Rodriguez thanked Morano:  he was not sure if Morano had behaved as a guest’s servant should.  But when he thought of the Professor’s terrible spells, which had driven them to the awful crags of the sun, and might send them who knows where to hob-nob with who knows what, his second thoughts perceived that Morano was right to cut short those arts that the Slave of Orion loved, even by so extreme a step:  and he praised Morano as his ready shrewdness deserved.