Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/347

 was her own genie, her own special and peculiar gift, he was disarmed.

"You have the voice, the bearing, of a god," she said, quivering with terror, "but your speech belongs to the underworld whence I have come. Persist in it and we return to it together, walking hand in hand."

The advocate strove feebly to escape from the demonic faculty which already had been exerted upon him. She resisted him mournfully.

"You cannot put me off, my deliverer. Hence-*forward your ways are my ways. I go with you to the bright fields of your native kingdom, or I return to the horrors of my own. I beseech you to take me by the hand and lead me along the golden paths to those mountain fastnesses in which you were born, in which the sun shines forever. You know how I have been dreaming that some saint and hero would lead me to them; you must make my dreams come true again, my deliverer, as you did but yesterday."

"Oh, why did you come to me?" cried Northcote weakly, as he strove in vain to free himself of the yoke that was already on his neck.

He seemed hardly to understand that he had to deal with a desperate gambler who was staking all upon a final cast.

"Do not let me perish," cried the woman. "Do not say this is an illusion upon which I have built my miraculous faith. Do not tell me that the gods walk the earth no more!"

The tragic distension of her countenance filled the young man with horror, yet also with a sense of its weird poetry.