light again, never
to climb in at a window, or see brave jewels shine under his lantern,
but to wander, and wander, and wander between these inexorable walls
till he died, and the rats, admitting him to their brotherhood, swarmed
round the dead body of him.

"I had better have been born a fool," said the thief.

Then once more he went through the damp and the blackness of the vaulted
passages, tremulously searching for some outlet, but in vain.

Only at last, in a corner behind a pillar, he found a very little door
and a stair that led down. So he followed it, to wander among other
corridors and cellars, with the silence heavy about him, and despair
growing thick and cold like a fungus about his heart, and in his brain
the fear of death beating like a hammer.

It was quite suddenly in his wanderings, which had grown into an aimless
frenzy, having now less of search in it than of flight from the
insistent silence, that he saw at last a light--and it was the light of
day coming through an open door. He stood at the door and breathed the
air of the morning. The sun had risen and touched the tops of the towers
of the house with white radiance; the birds were singing loudly. It was
morning, then, and he was a free man.

He looked about him for a way to come at the park, and thence to the
broken wall and the white road, which he had come by a very long time
before. For this door opened on an inner enclosed courtyard, still in
damp shadow, though the sun above struck level across it--a courtyard
where tall weeds grew thick and dank. The dew of the night was heavy on
them.

As he stood and looked, he was aware of a low, buzzing sound that came
from the other side of the courtyard. He pushed through the weeds
towards it; and the sense of a presence in the silence came upon him
more than ever it had done in the darkened house, though now it was day,
and the birds sang all gaily, and the good sun shone so bravely
overhead.

As he thrust aside the weeds which grew waist-high, he trod on something
that seemed to writhe under his feet like a snake. He started back and
looked down. It was the long, firm, heavy plait of a woman's hair. And
just beyond lay the green gown of a woman, and a woman's hands, and her
golden head, and her eyes; all about the place where she lay was the
thick buzzing of flies, and the black swarming of them.

The thief saw, and he turned and he fled back to his doorway, and down
the steps and through