rtainty of what I should see, and quickly mounted
the stair.

I shall never forget what I saw as I stood with my feet on the rickety
hand-rail of the ladder. The long dim garret was already half-lighted by
the coming day. Red cloaks swung and flapped like vast, deadly, winged
bats from the rafters, and reached almost to the ground. There was no
glass in any of the windows of the garret, for my father minded neither
heat nor cold. He was a man of iron. Summer's heat nor winter's cold
neither vexed nor pleasured him. So it was no marvel that at the
chamber's upper end, and quite near to my father's bed, lay a wreath of
snow, with a fine, clean-cut, untrampled edge, just as it had blown in at
the gable window when the storm burst from the east.

My father lay stretched out on his bed, his head thrown back, his neck
bare--almost as if he had done justice on himself, or at least as if he
waited the stroke of another Red Axe through the eastern skylight which
the morning was already crimsoning. His scarlet sheathings of garmentry
lay upon a black oaken stool, trailing across the floor lank and hideous,
one of the cuffs which had been but recently dyed a darker hue making a
wet sop upon the boards.

All this I had seen many a time before. But that which made me tremble
from head to foot with more and worse than cold, was the little white
figure that danced about his bed--for all the world like a crisped leaf
in late autumn which whirls and turns, skipping this way and spinning
that in the wanton breezes. It was the Little Playmate. But I could not
form a word wherewith to call her. My tongue seemed dried to the roots.

She had taken the red eye-mask which came across my father's face when he
did his greater duties and tied it about her head. Her great, innocent,
childish eyes looked elfishly through the black socket holes, sparkling
with a fairy merriment, and her tangled floss of sunny hair escaped from
the string at the back and fell tumultuously upon her shoulders.

And even as I looked, standing silent and trembling, with a little
balancing step she danced up to the Red Axe itself where it stood angled
against the block, and seizing it by the handle high up near the head she
staggered towards the bed with it.

Then came my words back to my mouth with a rush.

"For the Holy Virgin's sake, little maid, put the Red Axe down!" I cried,
whisperingly. "You know not what you do!"

Then even as I spoke I saw that my father