Part 13

"Ah ... it is you ... at last."

"Well!"

Verrill smiled:

"It _is_ well, I had imagined it would be so different,--when you did come. But as it is--," he extended his hand, "I am very glad to meet you."

"Did I not tell you," said the other, "that of all the world, I am the most cruelly misunderstood?"

"But you confessed to the masquerade."

"Oh, blind, blind, not to see behind the foolish masque. Come, we have not yet drunk."

He placed the cup in Verrill's hands, and once again raised the glass.

"To our better acquaintance," he said.

"To our better acquaintance," echoed Verrill. He drained the cup.

"The lees were bitter," he observed.

"But the effect?"

"Yes, it is calming--already, exquisitely so. It is not--as I have imagined for so long, deadening, on the contrary, it is invigorating, revivifying. I feel born again."

The other rose: "Then there is no need," he said, "to stay here any longer. Come, shall we be going?"

"Yes, yes, I am ready," answered Verrill. "Look," he exclaimed, pointing to the windows. "Look--it is morning."

Low in the east, the dawn was rising over the city. A new day was coming; the stars were paling, the night was over.

"That is true," said Verrill's new friend. "Another day is coming. It is time we went out to meet it."

They rose and passed down the length of the Banquet Hall. He who had called himself the great Physician, the Servant of the Humble, the Master of Kings, the Prince of Masqueraders, held open the door for Verrill to pass. But when the man had gone out, the Prince paused a moment, and looked back upon the deserted Banquet Hall, lit partly by the steady electrics, partly by the pale light of morning, that now began with ever-increasing radiance to stream through the eastern windows. Then he stretched forth his hand and laid his touch upon a button in the wall. Instantly the lights sank, vanished; for a moment the hall seemed dark.

He went out quietly, shutting the door behind him.

* * * * *

And the Banquet Hall remained deserted, lonely, empty, yet it was neither dark nor lifeless. Stronger and stronger grew the flood of light that burned roseate toward the zenith as the sun came up. It penetrated to every corner of the room, and the drops of wine left in the bottom of the glasses flashed like jewels in the radiance. From without, from the city's streets, came the murmur of increasing activity. Through the night it had droned on, like the low-pitched diapason of some vast organ, but now as the sun rose, it swelled in volume. Louder it grew and ever louder. Its sound-waves beat upon the windows of the hall. They invaded the hall itself.

It was the symphony of energy, the vast orchestration of force, the paean of an indestructible life, coeval with the centuries, renascent, ordained, eternal.