aped body, instead of bearing the naked ribs of a
skeleton, was snow white.

And now she began to understand. Somebody had already caught the moth, had
wrapped around its body a cylinder of white tissue paper--tied it on with
a fine, white silk thread.

The moth was very still now, exploring the interstices between tumbler and
table with heavy, pectinated antennae.

Cautiously Maryette bent forward and dropped both hands on the moth.

Instantly the creature cried out horribly; it was like a mouse between her
shrinking fingers; but she slipped the cylinder of tissue paper from its
abdomen and released it with a shiver; and it darted and whizzed around
the room, gyrating in whistling circles around her head until, unnerved,
she struck at it again and again with empty hands, following, driving it
toward the open window, out of which it suddenly darted.

But now there was another Death's Head in the room, a burly, headlong,
infatuated male which drove headlong at the tumbler and clung to it,
slipping, sliding, filling the room with a feathery tattoo of wings.

It, also, had a snow-white body; and before she had seized the squeaking
thing and had slipped the tissue wrapper from its body, another Death's
Head whirred through the window; then another, then two; then others. The
room swarmed; they were crawling all over the tumbler, the table, the bed.
The room was filled with the soft, velvety roar of whirring wings beating
on wall and ceiling and against the tumbler where Madam Death sat
imprisoned, quivering her wings, her eyes two molten rubies, and the
ghastly skull staring from her back.

How Maryette ever brought herself to do it; how she did it at last, she
had no very clear idea. The touch of the slippery, mousy bodies was
fearsomely repugnant to her; the very sight of the great, skull-bearing
things began to sicken her physically. A dreadful, almost impalpable floss
from their handled wings and bodies smeared her hands; the place vibrated
with their tiny goblin cries.

Somehow she managed to strip them of the tissue cylinders, drive them from
where they crawled on ceiling, wall and sill into whistling flight. Amid a
whirlwind of wings she fought them toward the open window; whizzing,
flitting, circling they sped in widening spirals to escape her blows,
where she stood half blinded in the vortex of the ghostly maelstrom.

One by one they darted through the open window out into the night; and
when the last spec