In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from very far away he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking on wood.  He noticed that the wind had lulled suddenly.

His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself he carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been traversing for the last six hours—­the oppressive sense of an uninhabited world.  When he raised his head a gleam of light, illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam before his eyes.  While he peered, the sound of feeble knocking was repeated—­ and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence of a massive obstacle in his path.  What was it?  The spur of a hill?  Or was it a house!  Yes.  It was a house right close, as though it had risen from the ground or had come gliding to meet him, dumb and pallid; from some dark recess of the night.  It towered loftily.  He had come up under its lee; another three steps and he could have touched the wall with his hand.  It was no doubt a posada and some other traveller was trying for admittance.  He heard again the sound of cautious knocking.

Next moment a broad band of light fell into the night through the opened door.  Byrne stepped eagerly into it, whereupon the person outside leaped with a stifled cry away into the night.  An exclamation of surprise was heard too, from within.  Byrne, flinging himself against the half closed door, forced his way in against some considerable resistance.

A miserable candle, a mere rushlight, burned at the end of a long deal table.  And in its light Byrne saw, staggering yet, the girl he had driven from the door.  She had a short black skirt, an orange shawl, a dark complexion—­and the escaped single hairs from the mass, sombre and thick like a forest and held up by a comb, made a black mist about her low forehead.  A shrill lamentable howl of:  “Misericordia!” came in two voices from the further end of the long room, where the fire-light of an open hearth played between heavy shadows.  The girl recovering herself drew a hissing breath through her set teeth.

It is unnecessary to report the long process of questions and answers by which he soothed the fears of two old women who sat on each side of the fire, on which stood a large earthenware pot.  Byrne thought at once of two witches watching the brewing of some deadly potion.  But all the same, when one of them raising forward painfully her broken form lifted the cover of the pot, the escaping steam had an appetising smell.  The other did not budge, but sat hunched up, her head trembling all the time.

They were horrible.  There was something grotesque in their decrepitude.  Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one’s eyes, had not gripped one’s heart with poignant amazement at the unspeakable misery of age, at the awful persistency of life becoming at last an object of disgust and dread.