a torch showed far ahead above a crowd packed thick between dark
house-fronts and gables. They glistened with wet and sent down from
their gutters spouts of water that gleamed, catching the light of the
torch, like threads of opal fire on the pallid dove colour of the
towering house-fronts. The torch went round a corner, its light
withdrew along the walls by long jumps as its bearer stepped into the
distance ahead. Then it was all black. Walking was difficult over the
immense cobbles of the roadway, but in the pack of the crowd it was
impossible to fall, for people held one another. But it was also
impossible to speak, and, muffling her face in her hood, Katharine
walked smiling and squeezing Margot's hand out of pure pleasure with
the world that was so fair in the midst of this blackness and this
heavy cold.

There was a swishing repeated three times and three thuds and twists
of white on heads and shoulders just before her. Undistinguishable
yells of mockery dwindled down from high above, and a rush-light shone
at an immense elevation illuminating a faint square of casement that
might have been in the heavens. Three apprentices had thrown down
paper bags of powdered chalk. The men who had been struck, and several
others who had been maltreated on former nights, or who resented this
continual 'prentice scandal, began a frightful outcry at the door of
the house. More bags came bursting down and foul water; the yells and
battlecries rolled, in the narrow space under the house-fronts that
nearly kissed each other high overhead, and the crowd, brought to a
standstill, swayed and pushed against the walls. Katharine lost her
hold of the old knight's sleeve, and she could see no single thing.
She felt round her in the blackness for his arm, but a heavy man
stumbled against her. Suddenly his hand was under her arm, drawing her
a little; his voice seemed to say: 'Down this gully is a way about.'

In the passage it was blacker than the mouth of hell, and her eyes
still seemed to have in them the dazzle of light and triumph she had
just left. There was a frightful stench of garbage; and it appeared to
be a vault, because the outcry of the men besieging the door volleyed
and echoed the more thunderously. There came the sharp click of a
latch and Katharine found herself impelled to descend several steps
into a blackness from which came up a breath of closer air and a smell
of rotting straw. Fear suddenly seized upon her, and the