It was neither the glancing of a moth's wing, the nodding of a wind-touched blossom, nor the noiseless flitting of a bat.

It was a gleam merely, faint, elusive, impossible of definition, an intangible agitation, in the vast, dim blur of the darkness.
And that was all.

Until now no single real thing had occurred, nothing that Vanamee could reduce to terms of actuality, nothing he could put into words.

The manifestation, when not recognisable to that strange sixth sense of his, appealed only to the most refined, the most delicate perception of eye and ear.

It was all ephemeral, filmy, dreamy, the mystic forming of the Vision--the invisible developing a concrete nucleus, the starlight coagulating, the radiance of the flowers thickening to something actual; perfume, the most delicious fragrance, becoming a tangible presence.
But into that garden the serpent intruded.