I had staggered back with that cry in my throat, when I felt fingers like iron clamps close on my arm and hold it.  The grip, more than the face I turned to look upon in my surging terror, was forcibly human.

It was the warder Johnson who had seized me, and my heart bounded as I met the cold fury of his eyes.

“Prying!” he said, in a hoarse, savage whisper.  “So you will, will you?  And now let the devil help you!”

It was not this fellow I feared, though his white face was set like a demon’s; and in the thick of my terror I made a feeble attempt to assert my authority.

“Let me go!” I muttered.  “What! you dare?”

In his frenzy he shook my arm as a terrier shakes a rat, and, like a dog, he held on, daring me to release myself.

For the moment an instinct half-murderous leapt in me.  It sank and was overwhelmed in a slough of some more secret emotion.

“Oh!” I whispered, collapsing, as it were, to the man’s fury, even pitifully deprecating it.  “What is it?  What’s there?  It drew me—­something unnameable”.

He gave a snapping laugh like a cough.  His rage waxed second by second.  There was a maniacal suggestiveness in it; and not much longer, it was evident, could he have it under control.  I saw it run and congest in his eyes; and, on the instant of its accumulation, he tore at me with a sudden wild strength, and drove me up against the very door of the secret cell.

The action, the necessity of self-defence, restored me to some measure of dignity and sanity.

“Let me go, you ruffian!” I cried, struggling to free myself from his grasp.

It was useless.  He held me madly.  There was no beating him off:  and, so holding me, he managed to produce a single key from one of his pockets, and to slip it with a rusty clang into the lock of the door.

“You dirty, prying civilian!” he panted at me, as he swayed this way and that with the pull of my body.  “You shall have your wish, by G—!  You want to see inside, do you?  Look, then!”

He dashed open the door as he spoke, and pulled me violently into the opening.  A great waft of the cold, dank air came at us, and with it—­what?

The warder had jerked his dark lantern from his belt, and now—­an arm of his still clasped about one of mine—­snapped the slide open.

“Where is it?” he muttered, directing the disc of light round and about the floor of the cell.  I ceased struggling.  Some counter influence was raising an odd curiosity in me.

“Ah!” he cried, in a stifled voice, “there you are, my friend!”

He was setting the light slowly travelling along the stone flags close by the wall over against us, and now, so guiding it, looked askance at me with a small, greedy smile.

“Follow the light, sir,” he whispered jeeringly.

I looked, and saw twirling on the floor, in the patch of radiance cast by the lamp, a little eddy of dust, it seemed.  This eddy was never still, but went circling in that stagnant place without apparent cause or influence; and, as it circled, it moved slowly on by wall and corner, so that presently in its progress it must reach us where we stood.