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That extraordinary American with his tales of witch-lights and haunted abbeys has been playing the devil with our nerves." Together we waited by the gate until the half-caste appeared on the bend of the path with a grip in either hand.

Lamps glittered everywhere; electric lights were doubly festooned along the sea wall, drooping creeper-like from palm to palmetto, from flowering hibiscus to sprawling banyan, from dainty china-berry to grotesque screw-pine tree, shedding strange witch-lights over masses of blossoms, tropical and semi-tropical.

And the evening came, misty but mild, with the moon peering doubtfully through a fleecy veil of fine floating vapour, which, gathering flashes of luminance from the silver orb, turned to the witch-lights of an opal, and Aubrey made his way to the Casa D'Angeli, which in his own mind he called the "Palais D'lffry," in memory of the old Breton song Sylvie had sung.

That extraordinary American with his tales of witch-lights and haunted abbeys has been playing the devil with our nerves." He glanced up at the tower. "What a place to live in! Frankly, I don't think I could stand it." Together we waited by the gate until the half-caste appeared on the bend of the path with a grip in either hand.

"Whatever can it possibly be?" queried Harry; "I have never seen anything like it before." "I suspect," returned Roger, "that it is in some way connected with the approaching storm. I have heard sailors speak of those lights as witch-lights, death-gleams, and corposants, and their appearance is said always to foretell disaster.

Silver, crystal, china, even the human figures appeared whirling in a misty circle, across which the orange, emerald, and blue tints of the hock glasses shot hither and thither like witch-lights on the Brocken; and indistinct and spectral, yet alluring, gleamed the almond-shaped grey eyes with their gold fringes.

The Celtic vision of my forefathers, that strange mixture of the terrors of Druid and soggarth, danced on the creaking floor, and witch-lights gleamed on ceiling and timbers. I thought to dissolve it all with a match, but whether all awake or partly asleep, I had no strength to reach it. Then something clammily touched my face, and with a bound I had the lantern going.

Venetian lamps glowed like yellow witch-lights in the branches; fountains tossed moon-bright sprays of quicksilver aloft and tinkled with the splash; the waters of a sunken pool, jeweled in stars, glimmered darkly green through files of cypress. All in all, an entrancing moon-mad world of mystery and dusk-moths, heavy with the scent of jasmine and orange.