ork similar to that of a bridge, the essential framework still
held together, but the outside walls, mere shells of stone and brick,
had cracked and given way under the strain, falling piece-meal into the
street below. Even as he looked, a stone dropped from a window pediment
and crashed into splinters on the pavement a few yards beyond where he
stood. The angle of inclination seemed to grow larger as he gazed at
it; the enormous mass poised itself above him, monstrous, informed,
threatening to strike.

With that uncomfortable contraction of the scalp-skin that attends upon
the sudden presence of peril, Constans backed hastily away; not for
worlds would he have ventured again under that overhang of artificial
cliff. Yet behind him was the stretch of sunken pavement; he could not
risk another passage of that. A single alternative remained--to enter
one of the small houses that lined the street, ascend to its roof, and
so escape to the nearest cross thoroughfare.

With a sigh of relief, Constans threw open the scuttle and climbed out
upon the leads. He had entered at random one of the mean-looking
edifices that hemmed him in at the right and left, and it was pleasant
to escape from the close atmosphere of its long-unused staircases and
corridors. Apparently the house had been occupied as a tenement in the
ancient time; the marks of its degradation had survived the universal
decay, and there was even a fetid suggestion in the air of old-time
squalor and disease. Glad he was to be free of it all, and he let the
scuttle fall to with a bang.

After surveying the different routes as best he could, Constans
determined to work his way to the southward. He took one forward step
and stood transfixed; from below then came a faint but unmistakable tap,
tap upon the closed scuttle. The bare suspicion that there could be some
living thing in that hideous interior, that it was appealing to him for
aid, made him physically sick. But better to meet any horror face to
face than to wrestle longer with the invisible presence of Fear; he
threw aside the hatch, and a big white owl flew out, its wing grazing
his face. He could have shouted aloud, so nakedly had his nerves been
laid bare in the last quarter of an hour; then setting his teeth hard he
took hold of himself and laughed at his own vaporing. The worst was over
now; he was sure of that, and so again took courage.

It was an easy matter to pass from one connecting roof to another, a