As Petite Jeanne prepared to leave her room on the following evening for her third secret visit to the old Blackmoore, where she hoped once more to dance in Jimmie’s golden circle of light, she experienced a strange sensation. Events had been crowding in upon her. There was the strange gypsy, the fluttering of wings, the battle of Maxwell Street, the lost traveling bags. All these had, beyond doubt, exercised a powerful influence upon her. Be that as it may, she felt at that moment as if she were within a great funnel filled with sand. The sand was slipping, sliding, gliding downward toward a vortex and she, battling as she might, was slipping with it. And toward what an uncertain end!
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As she closed her eyes, however, she realized that this vision belonged to the remote past—her very earliest childhood. In those days, she faintly recalled, there had been in a room of some house where she lived, an hour glass. This hour glass was composed of two glass funnels whose very narrow tips were made to meet. One of these funnels had been filled with fine sand. Then the broad ends of each had been sealed.

When this hour glass was set down with the empty funnel at the bottom, the sand trickled slowly down from the upper one.

“I seem to be inside the full glass,” she told herself. “The sands of time are sinking and I am sinking with them. Struggle as I may, I sink, sink, sink!

“But perhaps,” she said with a little shudder, “the giant hand of Fate, passing by, will seize the glass and turn it end for end. Then the sand will begin trickling down upon my head.”

The thought did not please her, so, shaking herself free from it, she hastened down the stairs and caught a bus, and whirled away toward quite another world.
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As she closed her eyes once more for a moment’s rest, a second vision passed before her. A fleeting but very real vision it was, too—a marble falcon with a broken beak looking intently toward the sky. Then she recalled Merry’s words as they had parted on the previous evening: “Things are rather hard at times, but the falcon still looks up, so all will be well in the end.”

In spite of her efforts at self-control, Jeanne found her knees trembling as she entered Jimmie’s circle of light that night.

“For shame!” She stamped her dainty foot. “What is there to fear? The sound of wings. A bat perhaps, or a pigeon.”

Even as she said the words, she knew that she was lying to herself. There were no pigeons in the place. Pigeons leave marks. There were no marks. Bats there could not be, for bats pass on silent wings. Then, too, they snap their teeth.

“It is nothing,” she insisted stoutly, “and I shall dance to-night as never before!”

Jimmy was ready, later, to testify that she carried out this promise to herself.
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