BROOD OF THE WITCH-QUEEN

CHAPTER I

ANTONY FERRARA

Robert Cairn looked out across the quadrangle. The moon had just
arisen, and it softened the beauty of the old college buildings,
mellowed the harshness of time, casting shadow pools beneath the
cloisteresque arches to the west and setting out the ivy in stronger
relief upon the ancient walls. The barred shadow on the lichened
stones beyond the elm was cast by the hidden gate; and straight ahead,
where, between a quaint chimney-stack and a bartizan, a triangular
patch of blue showed like spangled velvet, lay the Thames. It was from
there the cooling breeze came.

But Cairn's gaze was set upon a window almost directly ahead, and west
below the chimneys. Within the room to which it belonged a lambent
light played.

Cairn turned to his companion, a ruddy and athletic looking man,
somewhat bovine in type, who at the moment was busily tracing out
sections on a human skull and checking his calculations from Ross's
_Diseases of the Nervous System_.

"Sime," he said, "what does Ferrara always have a fire in his rooms
for at this time of the year?"

Sime glanced up irritably at the speaker. Cairn was a tall, thin
Scotsman, clean-shaven, square jawed, and with the crisp light hair
and grey eyes which often bespeak unusual virility.

"Aren't you going to do any work?" he inquired pathetically. "I
thought you'd come to give me a hand with my _basal ganglia_. I shall
go down on that; and there you've been stuck staring out of the
window!"

"Wilson, in the end house, has got a most unusual brain," said Cairn,
with apparent irrelevance.

"Has he!" snapped Sime.

"Yes, in a bottle. His governor is at Bart's; he sent it up yesterday.
You ought to see it."

"Nobody will ever want to put _your_ brain in a bottle," predicted the
scowling Sime, and resumed his studies.

Cairn relighted his pipe, staring across the quadrangle again. Then--

"You've never been in Ferrara's rooms, have you?" he inquired.

Followed a muffled curse, crash, and the skull went rolling across the
floor.

"Look here, Cairn," cried Sime, "I've only got a week or so now, and
my nervous system is frantically rocky; I shall go all to pieces on my
nervous system. If you want to talk, go ahead. When you're finished, I
can begin work."

"Right-oh," said Cairn calmly, and tossed his pouch across. "I want to
talk to you about Ferrara."

"Go ahead then. What is the matter with Ferrara?"

"Wel