nd then he stumbled and she was gone. He heard her maddening
laughter as she fled.

The ascent seemed endless. His heart was pumping, but he would not
slacken. She should never triumph over him, this mocking imp, this
butterfly-girl, who from the first had held him with a fascination he
could not fathom. He would make her pay for her audacity. He would teach
her that he was more than a mere butt for her drollery. He would show
her--

A door suddenly banged high above him. He realized that she had reached
the top of the turret and burst out upon the ramparts. A very curious
sensation went through him. It was almost a feeling of fear. She was such
a wild little creature, and her mood was at its maddest. The chill of the
place seemed to wrap him round. He felt as if icy fingers had clutched
his heart.

It was all a joke of course--only a joke! But jokes sometimes ended
disastrously, and Toby--Toby was not an ordinary person. She was either a
featherbrain or a genius. He did not know which. Perhaps there was no
very clear dividing line between the two. She was certainly
extraordinary. He wished he had not accepted her challenge. If he had
refused to follow, she would soon have abandoned her absurd flight
through the darkness.

It was absurd. They had both been absurd to come to this eerie place
without a light. Somehow her disappearance, the clanging of that door,
had sobered him very effectually. He cursed himself for a fool as he
groped his way upwards. The game had gone too far. He ought to have
foreseen.

And then suddenly he blundered into an iron-clamped door and swore again.
Yes, this thing was beyond a joke.

The door resisted him, and he wrestled with it furiously as though it had
been a living thing obstructing his passage.

He had begun to think that she must have bolted it on the outside when
abruptly it yielded to his very forcible persuasion, and he stumbled
headlong forth into the open starlight. He was out upon the ramparts, and
dim wooded park-lands stretched away to the sea before his dazzled eyes.

The first thing that struck him was the emptiness of the place. It seemed
to catch him by the throat. There was something terrible about it.

Behind him the door clanged, and the sound seemed the only sound in all
that wonderful June night. It had a fateful effect in the silence--like
the tolling of a bell. Something echoed to it in his own heart, and he
knew that he was afraid.

Desperately he flu