rom its temporary eclipse. With one last
shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder
for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew,
he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the
direction of the hotel.

And as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling,
followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter
with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses.

VI

"It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending," said Arthur
Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting
there with his notebook, "but the fact is--er--from that moment my
memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of
how I got home or what precisely I did.

"It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect
racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages,
still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a
biggish town and so came to a station.

"But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and
looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the
moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay
there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main
streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its
torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the utmost
vividness to this day.

"Another thing remains in my mind from that escape--namely, the sudden
sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made,
standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left
behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.

"For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a cafe
on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way
to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I
reached London."

"And how long altogether," asked John Silence quietly, "do you think you
stayed in the town of the adventure?"

Vezin looked up sheepishly.

"I was coming to that," he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his
body. "In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of
time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been
September 15th,--instead of which it was only September 10th!"

"So that, in reality, you had