"'Look yet again, and for the last time! Behold the worm that gnaws away the bravery of a nation and makes it a prey for the spoiler!' Heart-brokenly sad was the music now, as the vision changed once more, and I saw a great crowd of men, each in the uniform of an officer of the United States army, clustered around one who seemed to be their chief. But while I looked, I saw one by one totter and fall, and directly I perceived that the epaulette or shoulder-strap on the shoulder of each was a great hideous yellow worm, that gnawed away the shoulder and palsied the arm and ate into the vitals. Every second, one fell and died, making frantic efforts to tear away the reptile from its grasp, but in vain. Then the white mists rolled away, and I saw the strange woman standing where she had been when the first vision began. She was silent, the music was hushed, Adolph Von Berg had fallen back asleep in his chair, and drawing out my watch, I discovered that only ten minutes had elapsed since the sorceress spoke her first word.
"'You have seen all—go!' was her first and last interruption to the silence. The instant after, the curtain fell. I kicked Von Berg to awake him, and we left the house. The coupé was waiting in the street and set me down at my lodgings, after which it conveyed my companion to his. Adolph did not seem to have a very clear idea of what had occurred, and my impression is that he went to sleep the moment the first strain of music commenced.
"As for myself, I am not much clearer than Adolph as to how and why I saw and heard what I know that I did see and hear. I can only say that on that night of the twentieth of December, 1860, the same on which, as it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, witnessed what I have related.
"I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the affair as myself—which is not saying much!"
"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst of it—"Ugh! your idea—I beg your pardon!—your relation of the great yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a decoration."
"I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular.
"And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge—"
"That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and interrupting the half-sneer that was coming—"is the red woman whom I saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just before the door opened. What do you think of it?"
"Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round me, to think! Then the events of to-night—so much crowded in a little space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the fog on the East River in a February thaw!"
"And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more into play. "You are ready to go with me?"