Through the haze of the vapor came her voice, more musical, more
plaintive than I had heard it before, but far softer, more tender:
still in her foreign tongue; the words unknown to me, and yet their
sense, perhaps, made intelligible by the love, which has one common
language and one common look to all who have loved--the love
unmistakably heard in the loving tone, unmistakably seen in the
loving face.

A moment or so more and she had come round from the opposite side
of the fire pile, and bending over Margrave's upturned brow, kissed
it quietly, solemnly; and then her countenance grew fierce, her
crest rose erect: it was the lioness protecting her young. She
stretched forth her arm from the black mantle, athwart the pale
front that now again bent over the caldron--stretched it toward the
haunted and hollow-sounding space beyond, in the gesture of one
whose right hand has the sway of the scepter. And then her voice
stole on the air in the music of a chant, not loud yet far-
reaching; so thrilling, so sweet and yet so solemn that I could at
once comprehend how legend united of old the spell of enchantment
with the power of song. All that I recalled of the effects which,
in the former time, Margrave's strange chants had produced on the
ear that they ravished and the thoughts they confused, was but as
the wild bird's imitative carol, compared to the depth and the art
and the soul of the singer, whose voice seemed endowed with a charm
to inthrall all the tribes of creation, though the language it used
for that charm might to them, as to me, be unknown. As the song
ceased, I heard from behind sounds like those I had heard in the
spaces before me--the tramp of invisible feet, the whir of
invisible wings, as if armies were marching to aid against armies
in march to destroy.