y carcass of a rat. On the walls there was
nothing except a nail driven into the clay, which was crumbling between
the facing of whitewashed brick. From the heavy oaken timbers of the
wooden ceilings hung smutty banners of ancient cobwebs, stirring above
me as I moved. It was the very abomination of sinister desolation.

Some vague idea of finding something that might aid me--some scrap of
evidence I might chance on to kindle hope with--some neglected trifle
to damn him and proclaim this monstrous marriage void--it was this
instinct that led me into a house abhorred. Nothing I found, save, on
one foul window-pane, names, diamond-cut, scrawled again and again:
"Lyn," and "Cherry-Maid," repeated a score of times.

And long I lingered, pondering who had written it, and what it might
mean, and who was "Lyn." As for "Cherry-Maid," the name was used in the
False Faces rites; and at that terrific orgy held on the Kennyetto
before the battle of Oriskany, where the first split came in the walls
of the Long House, and where that hag-sorceress, Catrine Montour, had
failed to pledge the Oneidas to the war-post, the Cherry-Maid had taken
part. Indeed, some said that she was a daughter of the Huron witch; but
Jack Mount, who saw the rite, swore that the Cherry-Maid was but a
beautiful child, painted from brow to ankle----

Suddenly I thought of the hag's daughter as Carolyn. Carolyn? Lyn! By
heaven, the Cherry-Maid was Carolyn Montour, mistress of Walter Butler!
Here in bygone days she had scrawled her name--here her title. And
Walter Butler had been present at that frantic debauch where the False
Faces cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there
that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by
the Toad-Woman--this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the
False Faces in their gruesome rites and sacrifice!

I stared at the diamond scrawl; and before my eyes I seemed to see the
three fires burning, the clattering rows of wooden masks, the white
blankets of the sachems, the tawny, naked form of the Cherry-Maid,
seated between samphire and hazel, her pointed fingers on her hips, her
heavy hair veiling a laughing face, over which the infernal fire shadow
played.

Ah, it was well! Beast linked to beast--what need of priest in the
fierce mating of such creatures of the dusk? He was hers, and she his
by all laws of nature, and in the eternal fitness of things vast and
savage. They must liv