voices. One minute he thought it was outside the house, and the next he
was certain it came from somewhere in the upper part of the building. He
glanced up, and fancied for one moment that he saw in the darkness a
crowd of little faces peering down at him over the banisters, and that
as they disappeared he heard the sound of many little feet moving, and
then a door hurriedly closing. But a push from the figure behind that
nearly sent him sprawling at the foot of the stairs, prevented his
hearing very clearly, and the light was far too dim to let him feel
sure of what he had seen.

They passed quickly along deserted corridors and through winding
passages. No one seemed about. The interior of the house was chilly, and
the keen air nipped. After going up several flights of stairs they
stopped at last in front of a door, and before Jimbo had a moment to
turn and dash downstairs again past the figure, as he had meant to do,
he was pushed violently forward into a room.

The door slammed after him, and he heard the heavy tread of the figure
as it went down the staircase again into the bottom of the house. Then
he saw that the room was full of light and of small moving beings.

Curiosity and astonishment now for a moment took the place of fear, and
Jimbo, with a thumping heart and clenched fists, stood and stared at the
scene before him. He stiffened his little legs and leaned against the
wall for support, but he felt full of fight in case anything happened,
and with wide-open eyes he tried to take in the whole scene at once and
be ready for whatever might come.

But there seemed no immediate cause for alarm, and when he realised that
the beings in the room were apparently children, and only children, his
rather mixed sensations of astonishment and fear gave place to an
emotion of overpowering shyness. He became exceedingly embarrassed, for
he was surrounded by children of all ages and sizes, staring at him just
as hard as he was staring at them.

The children, he began to take in, were all dressed in black; they
looked frightened and unhappy; their bodies were thin and their faces
very white. There was something else about them he could not quite name,
but it inspired him with the same sense of horror that he had felt in
the arms of the Figure who had trapped him. For he now realised
definitely that he had been trapped; and he also began to realise for
the first time that, though he still had the body of a little boy, his