illy, they are rats!" said Heywood, in a voice curiously
forced and matter-of-fact. "Flounce killed several this afternoon,
so my--"

No one heeded him; all stared. The rats, like beings of incantation,
stole about with an absence of fear, a disregard of man's presence, that
was odious and alarming.

"Earthquake?" The elder Englishman spoke as though afraid of disturbing
some one.

The French doctor shook his head.

"No," he answered in the same tone. "Look."

The rats, in all their weaving confusion, displayed one common impulse.
They sprang upward continually, with short, agonized leaps, like
drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible flood.
The action, repeated multitudinously into the obscure background,
exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows tossing and falling
on the white walls, suggested the influence of some evil stratum, some
vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling poisonously along the ground.

Heywood stamped angrily, without effect. Wutzler stood abject, a
magician impotent against his swarm of familiars. Gradually the rats,
silent and leaping, passed away into the darkness, as though they heard
the summons of a Pied Piper.

"It doesn't attack Europeans." Heywood still used that curious
inflection.

"Then my brother Julien is still alive," retorted Doctor Chantel,
bitterly.

"What do you think, Gilly?" persisted Heywood.

His compatriot nodded in a meaningless way.

"The doctor's right, of course," he answered. "I wish my wife weren't
coming back."

"Dey are a remember," ventured Wutzler, timidly. "A warnung."

The others, as though it had been a point of custom, ignored him. All
stared down, musing, at the vacant stones.

"Then the concert's off to-morrow night," mocked Heywood, with an
unpleasant laugh.

"On the contrary." Gilly caught him up, prompt and decided. "We shall
need all possible amusements; also to meet and plan our campaign.
Meantime,--what do you say, Doctor?--chloride of lime in pots?"

"That, evidently," smiled the handsome man. "Yes, and charcoal burnt in
braziers, perhaps, as Pere Fenouil advises. Fumigate."--Satirical and
debonair, he shrugged his shoulders.--"What use, among these thousands
of yellow pigs?"

"I wish she weren't coming," repeated Gilly.

Rudolph, left outside this conference, could bear the uncertainty no
longer.

"I am a new arrival," he confided to his young host. "I do not
understand. What is it?"

"The plag