Ramon Alonzo descended, ate hungrily, and hastened to the room that was sacred to magic; and there was the Master in his usual place. There was reproach in the Master’s eye for the young man’s lateness, but words he did not waste, reserving them for that instruction in heathen spells which he immediately commenced. Every day the Master’s intention was growing clearer and the young man guessed it now: his was to be a name as revered, as dreaded, as his who had held the Chair of Magic at Saragossa; his wisdom, his loneliness, his aloofness, were to be as those of the dweller in the sombre house in the wood; his should be power at which the just should shudder; and mothers that could not call their children from play in the long evenings when they should be in bed would in the last resort shout Ramon Alonzo to them. Against this terrible fame the young man’s blood cried out, and the birds aided him, calling out of the wood, and the sunlight seemed on his side and against magic. Yesterday he had dared to make no protest against anything the Master might teach him, for he had seen in years of obsequiousness his only chance of ever recovering his shadow; but a new hope strengthened him now, and he asked a question that was in itself a protest. The Master was teaching him slowly a spell of terrible potency when Ramon Alonzo said: “Master, what chances of salvation hath a man that shall make use of this spell?”

“Salvation! Salvation!” said the Master. “A thing common to countless millions. The ordinary experience, hereafter, of half the human race. Is this to be put against knowledge of the hour of the return of the comet, against speech from these small fields, with spirits that wander from world to world, against strange tongues, runes and enchantments, and knowledge of ancient histories and visions of future wars; is this to be put against a hold upon the course of a star? Rather would I flame beside the Count of the Mountain, who held the Chair of Magic at Saragossa, and burn in that bright splendour that torments but cannot subdue him, than share with the ignorant populace any bliss that is common to vulgar righteousness. Aye, and upon the sulphur that he treads, damned if you will but held in reverence, kings have not hesitated to abase themselves in honour of his fame that resounds beyond time and far beyond earthly boundaries.”

Ramon Alonzo did not dare to say more: it was as though a student at work in a dingy classroom had claimed that some boyish game for which his own heart was longing was of more importance than the honoured learning that was being taught from the desk. The magician was growing angry: Ramon Alonzo bent his head to learn those Persian spells, but his mind was far from them with his hope and his formula. He learned in silence, while the magician bent to the work of making him his pupil and rendering him worthy of the terrible wisdom that had been brought down through the ages by the labour of the Dread Masters. And at last the black shape of the Master went out of the gloomy room and Ramon Alonzo was all alone with his hope.

His hope was that the first two syllables were right, that the quiver in the padlock was its preparation to open, as the spell thrilled through the brass, till the final syllable ab disappointed its expectation. He had therefore to try only once the thousands of possible sounds that might make the last syllable, instead of multiplying them by thousands more and working on till old age. The magician would be gone for some hours, returning again in the afternoon for another weary lesson. Spells guarded everything round Ramon Alonzo in the room that was sacred to magic while the magician was gone; spells, had he known it, could have brought to life one of the crocodiles when he drew his sword against magic, and it would have eaten him had the master not needed a pupil. But Ramon Alonzo cared only for one spell. He was down at once by the shadow-box, and this time all the spells that he tried began with “Ting Yung,” while he changed every time the last syllable. Once more whenever he touched the padlock he felt it quiver as he uttered the second syllable, while it calmed again as it heard the end of the spell. He became more and more certain that he held two-thirds of the secret, and that hours would free his shadow instead of years. Then, giving her shadow back to the poor old charwoman, he would flee from the sinister house, and work in some simpler way for Mirandola’s dowry, amongst unlearned folk, and have no more to do with such as should scorn salvation. The work of those hours surpassed in patience the labour of many a scholar studying mathematics, or chess-player analysing position or opening. Yet, when the Master returned again, he had tried little more than the syllables commencing with b, and the padlock upon the shadow-box was shut as fast as ever.

More weary hours passed with the heathen arts of Persia, Ramon Alonzo thinking all the while of Heaven, as a boy in school thinks of the green fields. I would not convey the dullness of those hours. They passed with the exact speed with which other hours pass, if measured by those movements of the Earth by which time is recorded; but, if spiritual measurements be used, and the hours be marked by the impatience, longing, and weariness felt by Ramon Alonzo, by that measurement they passed slowly. But the impatiences of man have their endings, as each of Earth’s revolutions; and night arrived and the magician left. Whither he went Ramon Alonzo knew not; perhaps to sleep; perhaps, he thought, to commune across the gulfs with the damned. Want of sleep and too much work, far from wearying Ramon Alonzo, had lit a fever in his veins that drove him to fierce activity, and he was down by the shadow-box rapidly uttering spells. Small winds and faint sounds went by, and the moths and the owls and the stars; and the mice went round and round. And midnight came, and that solitary shape crouching above the shadow-box had uttered to the padlock all the syllables that begin with c or d. No inspiration came to lighten that labour, but he clung to his formula which was one long monotony, thousands of phrases that all began with Ting Yung. He did not look at the slow changes of night, he scarcely saw the window; and yet black branches slanted against the stars remained a memory for all his years, and the sight of branches and stars whenever he saw it afterwards would always bring to him the weariest thoughts. His mind was peopled with hopes and disappointments as the wood was peopled with little hunters going abroad through the dark; but despair never came that night, for he was determined not to admit despair till the last of the sounds was tried for the third syllable. The stars paled as with illness; with intensest weariness, as it seemed to Ramon Alonzo, the dawn dragged upwards; the voices of the birds jarred on his hearing, made delicate by fatigue; and still he murmured on. To the syllables he had tried he had added now all beginning with f and g. They had gone slower than those beginning with d, because d, as he believed, could not be followed by l, which halved the number of sounds that he had to try. And now came h which, as he hoped, could not be followed either by l or r.

Dawn grew wider. Again he felt a hopelessness at the myriad shapes of matter appearing out of the darkness, all of them possessing what he lacked so conspicuously, each master of a shadow and he alone without one. Now the sun had risen but was hidden yet by the trees. And all of a sudden the hasp of the padlock opened. The spell was Ting Yung Han.

Hastily Ramon Alonzo removed the padlock, and cautiously opened the box. It was full of shadows. He closed the box again, as he saw them flutter, and went to the window to stuff his kerchief into a broken pane so that they should not escape; then he returned to the box. Then he opened the lid of the box a little way and took out a shadow in finger and thumb by the heels, as he had seen the magician hold his. This he laid on the floor and put a small jar upon it, which he took down from a shelf, trusting any piece of matter to hold down so delicate a thing as a shadow. Then he took out another and treated it in the same way. Then a third and a fourth. They were shadows of all kinds of folk, men and women, young and old. The red sun peeped in and saw the shadowless man laying out this queer assembly and holding them one by one with little weights. They did not grow as the red sun looked at them, for they were masterless and lost. They lay there grey on the floor, fluttering limply. And then, and then, Ramon Alonzo found his own shadow. He recognized it immediately. He put it to his heels. The shadow ran to them, and the instant that it had fastened there, never again, as Ramon Alonzo swore, to be removed as any fee or for any bribe whatever, it grew long in the early morning. At that moment they danced together as though they had been equal in the sight of matter, both of them ponderable and tangible things, both of them having thickness. And indeed for some while Ramon Alonzo could not feel any of that superiority that matter feels towards shadows; he only felt that there had been restored to him here the proud place that humanity holds amongst solid things, and hereafter salvation: they danced as equals, not as master and shadow. Round and round the floor went Ramon Alonzo dancing, and round and round the walls the shadow pranked behind him. Past every material shape in that room he went rejoicing knowing that with whatever dull feeling matter has, these shapes had scorned him as being less than them, remembering that he had marked himself their inferior by envying all that had shadows. The fatigue of the night and his dread had fallen away and he danced in sheer joy, and a wildness and fantasy about his leaping shadow seemed to show that it also had a joy of its own. As he watched its silent leapings following his merry steps, he began to understand how a soul might follow a shadow, as here on the solid Earth a shadow followed heels. He danced till a new fatigue overtaking happy muscles, not the fatigue of dread and monotony, began to weight his steps. Then he and his shadow rested. Again he went to the box, and the very next shadow he drew from it was the lithe shadow of a slender girl, with curls that seemed just now shaken by a sudden turn of the head, which showed in profile with young lips slightly parted. There was a grace about this young shadow as though Spring had come all of a sudden to one that had waited, wondering, at dawn while her elders slept. A maiden in Spring. And, as Ramon Alonzo looked long at that delicate profile, his fancies began to hear birdsong and distant sheep-bells, and all happy sounds of lost seasons that had made that wondering look. Who was she, he wondered, that could be so fair? Where was she: what fields lent such beauty? He was a man now, with a shadow. He could face the world. He need envy nothing among material things. He would search all Spain for the girl with the curly shadow. And his thoughts ran on into golden imagined days.

It was some while before he came back from those thoughts and remembered his quest and the promise he gave to the charwoman. He returned then to the shadow-box; but he would not weight down the shadow that had the waving curls, and it floated lightly about the room, while he took more from the box. The sun was not yet up to the tops of the trees, but was shining between the trunks when Ramon Alonzo took out the last of the shadows. There were shadows of two plump old women, there was the sweet curly shadow; all the rest were the shadows of men. No shadow was there that could possibly belong to the charwoman.

Before he imprisoned the shadows again in the box he made sure that he should be able to free them again. So he shut the box and put the padlock on, and said the spell to it; and it opened again. He did this two or three times. Then he picked up the shadows again in his finger and thumb, and put them back one by one. Last of all he went up to that slender curly shadow that was wandering free round the room, and it ran away from him and he ran after; but soon he caught it, for it ran no faster than it had learned to run when it ran at the heels of a young girl straying along the fields in Spring. This also he put back into the box, although he wept to do so. His own shadow only he kept. Then he fastened the padlock and hastened away from the room, for there was much to do. He had first to find the charwoman and to tell her of the failure of his quest, and to offer her the protection of his sword wherever she wished to go, if she desired to flee away from that house: this much he was bound to do when he could no longer hope to find the shadow that he had promised to rescue. Next he must return to the room in which the shadow-box lay, before the Master came, and wait in the gloomiest corner, so that the Master should not see that he had robbed the box of his shadow. And then he must part from the Master upon such terms that he could return to his house one happy day, when he had found the girl that had lost the curly shadow. This shadow he meant to rescue and give to her, and so to restore to her her lawful place among material things, and to marry her and forsake magic forever. But his sword was still in the service of the charwoman, and already he had planned another quest; and he had not yet escaped from that house. Were the magician to see his shadow before he went, or to go to the shadow-box and find it missing, it was unlikely that any of his impetuous plans or golden hopes of youth would ever come to fulfilment. He would perish upon that red flash of lightning, or under some frightful spell, and the Master would have his fee.

He ran to find the charwoman. Morning grew older with every step that he took, and brought the hour nearer when he must meet the magician; he came all out of breath to the nook where the old woman lived with her pails.

“Anemone,” he said, “I have opened the shadow-box.” There was a sudden catch in her breath. “It is not there,” he said.

“Was it the shadow-box?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Look. I have found my shadow. But yours, it was not there.”

She looked, and more joy came into her face at the sight of his rescued shadow than he had ever seen there before. He told her how his false shadow was lost and how he had found his true one. He told her of the other shadows that he had found in the box, he described the shadows of the two plump old women that could not have belonged to Anemone, he described the young slender shadow a little shyly, saying little at first; but some kind of power the charwoman seemed to have, though she scarcely spoke, made him tell more and more; and soon his love of the shadow with blown curls and slightly parted lips became transparent.

“But your shadow was not there,” he said, “and I can never find it now; but if you will flee at once away from this house you shall have my sword to protect you instead of your shadow, to whatever place that you may wish to go.”

She pushed some straw together into a heap.

“Sit down,” she said.