"Get your binoculars and we'll go on deck," Sam said. "I'm sure we're out of danger here."

I was not so sure about that, but I got the heavy glasses, and we stepped out on the metal deck. I looked back in the direction of the place whence we had come. The world was very still. Even the sea was almost silent. The old cottage on the hill behind us seemed suddenly very desolate and lonely, standing out, a solitary dark point, against the dying glow of the westward sky. It seemed very bleak and ancient.

And then I saw a curious thing--an astonishing thing. There was something bright hanging in the air a hundred yards above the building--something that shone with a silvery gleam! Steadily it grew brighter against the dull, somber curtain of the darkling western sky. Then I saw that it was a huge globe of white, metallic light. It was a great gleaming silver ball, evidently many feet in diameter! It glowed with a queer, unnatural effulgence! It was like a little floating moon!

In a moment I saw that a faint greenish haze was gathering about it. With astonishing swiftness a veil of glowing green mist was drawn about the sphere of shining white. It became a vast luminous green cloud that swirled and shifted in thin feathery streamers, drawn around the shining central globe. It swam, and swirled, and grew! It wheeled madly, dizzily, ever reaching out. It was a mist of flame like the photosphere about the sun. A strange, weird light shone from it, lighting the sea and the beach and the woodland about the doomed building with an uncanny radiance!

Quite abruptly two narrow beams of a thick, misty purple fire darted out of the silver core of the amazing thing, and, flashing over the ground, fixed themselves upon the cottage! They were like thin, unpleasant fingers of purple fog! There was something terrible in the swift sureness of their motions! They moved as if they were seeing eyes, or tentacles--feeling, searching!Suddenly they were gone. In a moment I noted a change. The seething clouds of green were sucked down. They drew into a dense cyclonic vortex of flame about the old house, like a falling torrent of molten emerald. The building was half hidden in the thick, racing fog. I strained my ears, but not a sound did I hear, save the soft whisper of the sea. The cloak of green mist swirled about its core with a silence that was complete--and terrible!

Suddenly the ancient house burst into strange red incandescence. The chimney, gables and corners shone with a dull, lurid scarlet fire. There was no flame, just a dusky, 

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