His head went dizzy. After the sleepless night, those swift changes from horror to love, from love to rage, his brain was fagged. The melodious voice sounding through the milky mists once more swayed his heart. There could be no danger in that call. He felt irresistibly drawn toward it, down, down, to join her. . . She could not have called from the bottom of the torrent. She called to love and safety.
Only when his feet were already slipping off the window ledge, he recalled with frenzy of new suspicions the tales about the sirens who lured the sailors to their doom, down into the waves, to be dashed against the rocks.
Once again he heard her call. Then his head struck against something hard and he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes, his head was lying on her lap, his temples bathed with some fragrant lotion. The sun shone over the dispersing mists, and the air was filled with vanishing rainbows. He looked dazedly around, and saw they were in a small garden, only a few paces away from the roaring torrent but separated from it by a high fence of grilled iron. Little rock-flowers, the color of dawn, trailed down beyond the bars, like wistful prisoners longing for their freedom.
He looked up, and the happenings of last night became suddenly clear to him. For the window from which he had jumped was but a few feet from the ground.
Shamefacedly he met the great luminous eyes of "the witch." Her face, wan, pale and suffering, bent over his.
"I was so afraid," she said. "You wouldn't open your eyes for so long. . . You had struck your head against the edges of the fountain."
Only now he saw the little round fountain playing among the water-lilies. Its marble basin was broken by the storm, and the water trickled out of it, running along the narrow flagstone path to join the waves raging below that secluded, flower-scented spot.
"But—hadn't he—hadn't that man leapt from there to his death?"
"Why, not from this tower. Do you think I could bear living here afterward? That wing is on the very brink of the torrent. The entrance has been nailed up; no one has entered it since the accident. Servants say demons live there."
At any other time he would have laughed at their superstitions; now, after he had been a victim of equally fantastic beliefs, he did not feel like scorning anyone's wild notions. Instead, he asked gently:
"Will you forgive me and go away from here, with me, away from witches and demons?"
She laughed tenderly.
"There are no devils here, only the bad will of the people. But I would go with you even to the top of the Witch Mountain."
He looked admiringly at her clear young face uplifted toward the sun sailing above the morning mists, and the heavy darkness rolled off his mind as if the sunshine reached its depths, chasing away the mists of superstition.
