lessly outside his door; furtive tiny animals with feet of velvet
must have run down the stairs and then halted, breathless and terrified,
on the other side of those rattling wooden panels.

He sat up in bed and groping for his tinder he struck a light; then he
listened again. Not a sound now stirred inside the house, only the wind
soughed through the loose tiles of the roof and found out the chinks and
cracks of the ill-fitting window, through which it blew with a sharp,
whistling sound. From the shop there came the faint murmur of some of
the watchmen snoring at their post.

Beyond that, nothing. And yet Diogenes, whose keen ear was trained to

catch the flutter of every twig, the movement of every beast, could have
sworn that someone was awake at this moment, in this house besides
himself--someone who breathed and trembled on the other side of the
door.

Without a moment's hesitation he slipped on his clothes as quickly as he
could, then he pulled the curtains across in front of the alcove and
paused for one second longer in order to listen.

He had certainly not been mistaken. Through the stillness of the house
he heard the soughing of the wind, the snoring of the watchmen, and that
faint, palpitating sound outside in the passage--that sound which was as
the breathing of some living, frightened thing.

Then he walked as noiselessly as he could up to the door, and with a
sudden simultaneous turn of key and handle he opened it suddenly.

It opened outwards, and the passage beyond was pitch dark, but there in
front of him now, white as a ghost, white as the garment which she wore,
white as the marble statue of the Madonna which he had seen in the
cathedral at Prague, stood the jongejuffrouw.

The candle which she carried flickered in the draught, and thus
flickering it lit up her large blue eyes which she kept fixed upon him
with an expression half defiant yet wholly terrified.

Frankly he thought at first that this was an apparition, a vivid
embodiment of the fevered fancies which had been haunting him. No wonder
therefore that he made no movement toward her, or expressed the
slightest astonishment at seeing her there, all alone, in the middle of
the night, not five paces away from him.

Thus they stood looking at one another for some time in absolute
silence; she obviously very frightened, hesitating betwixt audacity and
immediate flight, and he puzzled and with a vague sense of unreality
upon him, a sen