en by any intruder that might enter
that chamber.

And if Rodriguez appear to have been unduly suspicious, it should be
borne in mind not only that those empty rings needed much explanation,
but that every house suggests to the stranger something; and that
whereas one house seems to promise a welcome in front of cosy fires,
another good fare, another joyous wine, this inn seemed to promise
murder; or so the young man's intuition said, and the young are wise to
trust to their intuitions.

The reader will know, if he be one of us, who have been to the wars and
slept in curious ways, that it is hard to sleep when sober upon a
floor; it is not like the earth, or snow, or a feather bed; even rock
can be more accommodating; it is hard, unyielding and level, all night
unmistakable floor. Yet Rodriguez took no risk of falling asleep, so he
said over to himself in his mind as much as he remembered of his
treasured book, Notes in a Cathedral, which he always read to himself
before going to rest and now so sadly missed. It told how a lady who
had listened to a lover longer than her soul's safety could warrant, as
he played languorous music in the moonlight and sang soft by her low
balcony, and how she being truly penitent, had gathered many roses, the
emblems of love (as surely, she said at confession, all the world
knows), and when her lover came again by moonlight had cast them all
from her from the balcony, showing that she had renounced love; and her
lover had entirely misunderstood her. It told how she often tried to
show him this again, and all the misunderstandings are sweetly set
forth and with true Christian penitence. Sometimes some little matter
escaped Rodriguez's memory and then he longed to rise up and look at
his dear book, yet he lay still where he was: and all the while he
listened to the rats, and the rats went on gnawing and running
regularly, scared by nothing new; Rodriguez trusted as much to their
myriad ears as to his own two. The great spiders descended out of such
heights that you could not see whence they came, and ascended again
into blackness; it was a chamber of prodigious height. Sometimes the
shadow of a descending spider that had come close to the candle assumed
a frightening size, but Rodriguez gave little thought to it; it was of
murder he was thinking, not of shadows; still, in its way it was
ominous, and reminded Rodriguez horribly of his host; but what of an
omen, again, in a chamber full of