Front matter (continued 2)

More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honor and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a demon of the pit, what a gorgon of the Elder blasphemies, had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.

Nor was it right that the neighbors should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me—that horror which he must have learned as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside—the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation—was faintly, subtly, yet unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovelers. No wonder she owned a link with the old witchwoman Sophonisba—for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a loathsome, bestial thing, and her forebears had come from Africa.