In fleeting seconds was that deafness banished. With numbing haziness the murky tones of the orator's speech met her ears and swirled into the inner chambers of her mind. Spinning and tumbling, dispersing and irrevocably intermixing with the thoughts of her own genius, it drowned and overwhelmed the accustomed staid judgment and deliberation of a heretofore attentive intellect. Equilibrium was knocked from its foundation.

A staggered step listed her sideways, and she would have steadied herself on the shoulder of a red-lipped bystander if it had proven under her grasping reach to be more than so much wispy fog. Desperate fingers raking through that spectral frame found no saving grace; she fell heavily to one knee. Above, a garish, tinkling laugh found occasion in the mishap.

"You're as clumsy as me, when I've been in my cups," swelled a blithe voice, urging her back to her feet. "There's a happy girl, there's a good child; dust off, pick up!"

"Who --" Hoarsely formed a whisper in the fallen one's throat, height regained while a trembling finger shot to the platform, "...who is that man? And of what does he speak?"

Discharged with a gregarious beam came a forthright answer: "My son, sweet! Deception, he's called. Never was there a finer man than he, save his father. He speaks of this and that, all and nothing, anything and everything. I couldn't repeat it, really. You'd need a better mind than mine."

The listener crept a hand to her heart, instinctively shielding the organ's faster-moving pulse. "Who, madame, is his father?"

"Why, the great Deceit, of course!" babbled the spiritish presence, plump hands cupping before a motherly breast. "You're not from here, 'tis clear. A wealthy and important man in these parts, he is, though none of us are quite sure how he's managed it. I've never myself deduced his actual occupation, though not for lack of wondering! ...I'm Ignorance! You'll see a lot of me if you tarry about. I do make the rounds, and, in my own way, am quite as influential as my husband is, and much better loved."

Glazing eyes beheld the woman's florid smiles, and only dimly heard was her prattling introduction. Insensibility drove closed the child's heavy weighted lids and the next moment was a startled gasp sounding in the dense gloom of a chilled and lonely bedchamber.