Tansey aimlessly protracted his walk, and, whether it was his unfamiliarity with the district, his recent accession of audacious errantry, or the sophistical whisper of a certain green-eyed fairy, he came at last to tread a shuttered, blank, and echoing thoroughfare, dark and unpeopled.  And, suddenly, this way came to an end (as many streets do in the Spanish-built, archaic town of San Antone), butting its head against an imminent, high, brick wall.  No—­the street still lived!  To the right and to the left it breathed through slender tubes of exit—­narrow, somnolent ravines, cobble paved and unlighted.  Accommodating a rise in the street to the right was reared a phantom flight of five luminous steps of limestone, flanked by a wall of the same height and of the same material.

Upon one of these steps Tansey seated himself and bethought him of his love, and how she might never know she was his love.  And of Mother Peek, fat, vigilant and kind; not unpleased, Tansey thought, that he and Katie should play cribbage in the parlour together.  For the Cut-rate had not cut his salary, which, sordidly speaking, ranked him star boarder at the Peek’s.  And he thought of Captain Peek, Katie’s father, a man he dreaded and abhorred; a genteel loafer and spendthrift, battening upon the labour of his women-folk; a very queer fish, and, according to repute, not of the freshest.

The night had turned chill and foggy.  The heart of the town, with its noises, was left behind.  Reflected from the high vapours, its distant lights were manifest in quivering, cone-shaped streamers, in questionable blushes of unnamed colours, in unstable, ghostly waves of far, electric flashes.  Now that the darkness was become more friendly, the wall against which the street splintered developed a stone coping topped with an armature of spikes.  Beyond it loomed what appeared to be the acute angles of mountain peaks, pierced here and there by little lambent parallelograms.  Considering this vista, Tansey at length persuaded himself that the seeming mountains were, in fact, the convent of Santa Mercedes, with which ancient and bulky pile he was better familiar from different coigns of view.  A pleasant note of singing in his ears reinforced his opinion.  High, sweet, holy carolling, far and harmonious and uprising, as of sanctified nuns at their responses.  At what hour did the Sisters sing?  He tried to think—­was it six, eight, twelve?  Tansey leaned his back against the limestone wall and wondered.  Strange things followed.  The air was full of white, fluttering pigeons that circled about, and settled upon the convent wall.  The wall blossomed with a quantity of shining green eyes that blinked and peered at him from the solid masonry.  A pink, classic nymph came from an excavation in the cavernous road and danced, barefoot and airy, upon the ragged flints.  The sky was traversed by a company of beribboned cats, marching in stupendous, aerial procession.  The noise of singing grew louder; an illumination of unseasonable fireflies danced past, and strange whispers came out of the dark without meaning or excuse.