en door, and they came into a dim room where but
little light entered through the thick glass in the deep-set window.
There were heavy beams in the ceiling, and a great fireplace sent out an
odour of burning wood that Darnell never forgot, and the room seemed to
him full of women who talked all together in frightened tones. Mr.
Darnell beckoned to a tall, grey old man, who wore corduroy
knee-breeches, and the boy, sitting on a high straight-backed chair,
could see the old man and his uncle passing to and fro across the
window-panes, as they walked together on the garden path. The women
stopped their talk for a moment, and one of them brought him a glass of
milk and an apple from some cold inner chamber; and then, suddenly, from
a room above there rang out a shrill and terrible shriek, and then, in a
young girl's voice, a more terrible song. It was not like anything the
child had ever heard, but as the man recalled it to his memory, he knew
to what song it might be compared--to a certain chant indeed that
summons the angels and archangels to assist in the great Sacrifice. But
as this song chants of the heavenly army, so did that seem to summon all
the hierarchy of evil, the hosts of Lilith and Samael; and the words
that rang out with such awful modulations--_neumata inferorum_--were in
some unknown tongue that few men have ever heard on earth.

The women glared at one another with horror in their eyes, and he saw
one or two of the oldest of them clumsily making an old sign upon their
breasts. Then they began to speak again, and he remembered fragments of
their talk.

'She has been up there,' said one, pointing vaguely over her shoulder.

'She'd never know the way,' answered another. 'They be all gone that
went there.'

'There be nought there in these days.'

'How can you tell that, Gwenllian? 'Tis not for us to say that.'

'My great-grandmother did know some that had been there,' said a very
old woman. 'She told me how they was taken afterwards.'

And then his uncle appeared at the door, and they went their way as they
had come. Edward Darnell never heard any more of it, nor whether the
girl died or recovered from her strange attack; but the scene had
haunted his mind in boyhood, and now the recollection of it came to him
with a certain note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in
the way.

* * * * *

It would be impossible to carry on the history of Edward Darnell and