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the trim points of her patent-leather pumps to the hem of her pleated skirt; to the allure of her white, slender throat; to her black hair done primly back, revealing ears that were the shapeliest feature of her head.
     
    Suddenly she ended her recital. She closed the book, replaced it on an end table, got up. She moved to the French doors which opened upon the veranda running half the length of the house. Beyond, the lawn swept down toward the Neshaminy. The shadows of trees lay on the lawn, relieved by wide and ragged patches of golden moonlight. Where the lawn ended the gold was transmuted to silver as the fast-running waters of the creek caught and held the light, cast it away and took it back again. In the field beyond the creek corn stood in shocks, casting triangular shadows upon the black earth.
     
    “I think I’ll go for a walk,” Sara said.
     
     
    IT WAS fifteen minutes past three o’clock the next afternoon when a cab drove up to Eighth and South Streets. A young woman, chic in a silver-fox jacket that reached just short of her hips, stepped out. She handed the driver a bill and walked away with long, swaying strides.
     
    She walked west on South Street, knowing full well how the ragtag and bobtail of that ragtag street were staring at her.
     
    At Ninth Street she turned. A moment later she rang a bell. Almost instantly the door opened.
     
    A man with a lean, handsome face and a small mustache appeared.
     
    “I thought you would return,” he said.
     
    He guided her along the passage to the rear of the house and into a small chamber which, she found, had need of only the most meager furnishings. His personality filled every crack and crevice and corner.
     
    He seated her, and then seemed to forget.
     
    He started working over some papers. Sara had no idea what they were. But his preoccupation was total.
     
    She studied his face. She noted again the chiseled lines that somehow had an eternal look: the length in the thick black brows; thick hair that might have been touseled by all the winds of the world. She started as she remembered a portrait in a book Pierre had at home—Francis Barrett’s engraving of the demon Ashtaroth.
     
    She was extremely conscious, though they were lowered, of his eyes. She was glad that they did not look at her.
     
    She could not tell how long she sat there, nor when it was that she began to feel a change within herself. The pull and tug of self-questioning still went on. But now a new growth seemed to manifest itself. It was as if a tentacle reached out toward her from somewhere in the room—a tentacle that was as immaterial and yet as actual as a current of electricity. Watching the man at the desk, she became positive that the current flowed from him.
    The current was switched off.
     
    Perhaps fifteen minutes passed, in which she sat relaxed—and receptive. And then again the flow of that force began, sweeping into her with even greater strength. But this time it brought with it something else: a fragment of knowledge, as if the current were lighting a small incandescent lamp from the ray of which she could search (but only a little way) into herself. The weak beam turned first in one psychical direction and then another, hesitating and then moving on; revealing to Sara parts of herself that, formerly, she vaguely had perceived but never understood.
     
    The light swept the shadows from the old longings and exposed those longings in clearer outlines; yet the outlines, while giving promise of greater limning, were still so incomplete as to create tantalizing interest. And the promise, too, was of such delights, such ecstasies as Sara had never dared to imagine.
     
    The thought occurred to her that, for these, the price must be great. Then, just as the light seemed burning brighter, the man at the table stood up. He said:
     
    “I think that will be all—today.”
     
    Sara stood up. She stood uncertainly.
     
    “Who are you?” she asked.
     
    He answered,