beyond measure by a fiendish uproar. He had never heard anything so pitilessly strident in his life. The witches had started a fierce quarrel about something or other. Whatever it was, they were now only abusing each other violently, without arguments; their senile, guttural screams expressed nothing but wicked anger and ferocious dismay. The gipsy girl’s black eyes flew from one to the other. Never before had Byrne felt himself so removed from fellowship with human beings. Before he had really time to understand the subject of the quarrel, the girl jumped up, rattling her castanets loudly. A silence fell. She came up to the table and bent over, her eyes in his.

‘Señor,’ she said, with decision, ‘you shall sleep in the archbishop’s room.’

Neither of the witches objected. The dried-up one, bent double, waited, propped on a stick. The puffy- faced one had now a crutch.

Byrne got up, walked to the door, and turning the key in the enormous lock, put it coolly in his pocket. This was clearly the only entrance, and he did not mean to be taken unawares by whatever danger there might have been lurking outside. When he turned from the door he saw the two witches, ‘affiliated to the devil,’ and the Satanic girl looking at him in silence. He wondered if Tom Corbin took the same precaution last night. And thinking of him he had again that queer impression of his nearness. The world was perfectly dumb. And in this stillness he heard the blood beating in his ears with a confused rushing noise in which there seemed to be a voice uttering the words: ‘Mr Byrne, look out, sir.’ Tom’s voice. He shuddered; for the delusions of the sense of hearing are the most vivid of all, and from their nature have a compelling character.

It seemed impossible that Tom should not be there. Again a slight chill as of stealthy draught penetrated through his very clothes and passed over all his body. He shook off the impression with an effort.

It was the girl who preceded him upstairs, carrying an iron lamp from the naked flame of which ascended a thin thread of smoke. Her soiled white stockings were full of holes.

With the same quiet resolution with which he had locked the door below, Byrne threw open one after another the doors in the corridor. All the rooms were empty except for some nondescript lumber in one or two. And the girl, seeing what he would be at, stopped every time, raising the smoky light in each doorway patiently. Meantime she observed him with sustained attention. The last door of all she threw open herself.

‘You sleep here, señor,’ she murmured in a voice light as a child’s breath, offering him the lamp.

‘Good night señorita,’ he said politely, taking it from her.

She didn’t return the wish audibly, though her lips did move a little, while her gaze, black like a starless night, never for a moment wavered before him. He stepped in, and as he turned to close the door she was still there motionless and disturbing, with her voluptuous mouth and slanting eyes, with the expression of expectant sensual ferocity of an eager cat. He hesitated for a moment, and in the dumb house he heard again the blood pulsating ponderously in his ears, while once more the illusion of Tom’s voice speaking earnestly somewhere near by was specially terrifying because this time he could not make out the words.

He slammed the door in the girl’s face at last, leaving her in the dark; and he opened it again almost on the instant. Nobody. She had vanished without the slightest sound. He closed the door quickly and bolted it with two heavy bolts.

A profound mistrust possessed him suddenly. Why did the witches quarrel about letting him sleep in that room? And what meant that stare of the girl, as if she wanted to impress his features for ever in her mind? His own nervousness alarmed him. He seemed to himself to be removed very far from mankind.