n answer to my appeal. He ceased
playing, and the dying sound of the last note he had touched faded off
into a melancholy moan. The other men and the women burst once more into
peals of mocking laughter.

"Why will you persist in calling this your room?" said the woman next
me, with a smile meant to be kind, but to me inexpressibly loathsome.
"Have we not shown you by the furniture, by the general appearance of
the place, that you are mistaken, and that this cannot be your
apartment? Rest content, then, with us. You are welcome here, and need
no longer trouble yourself about your room."

"Rest content!" I answered madly; "live with ghosts, eat of awful meats,
and see awful sights! Never! never! You have cast some enchantment over
the place that has disguised it; but for all that I know it to be my
room. You shall leave it!"

"Softly, softly!" said another of the sirens. "Let us settle this
amicably. This poor gentleman seems obstinate and inclined to make an
uproar. Now we do not want an uproar. We love the night and its quiet;
and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is
coffined in clouds. Is it not so, my brothers?"

An awful and sinister smile gleamed on the countenances of her unearthly
audience, and seemed to glide visibly from underneath their masks.

"Now," she continued, "I have a proposition to make. It would be
ridiculous for us to surrender this room simply because this gentleman
states that it is his; and yet I feel anxious to gratify, as far as may
be fair, his wild assertion of ownership. A room, after all, is not much
to us; we can get one easily enough, but still we should be loath to
give this apartment up to so imperious a demand. We are willing,
however, to _risk_ its loss. That is to say,"--turning to me,--"I
propose that we play for the room. If you win, we will immediately
surrender it to you just as it stands; if, on the contrary, you lose,
you shall bind yourself to depart and never molest us again."

Agonized at the ever-darkening mysteries that seemed to thicken around
me, and despairing of being able to dissipate them by the mere exercise
of my own will, I caught almost gladly at the chance thus presented to
me. The idea of my loss or my gain scarce entered into my calculations.
All I felt was an indefinite knowledge that I might, in the way
proposed, regain in an instant, that quiet chamber and that peace of
mind of which I had so strangely been deprived.