everybody was about—­she was so noiseless and stealthy, and always at your elbow when you least expected.  Those large dismal eyes of hers, they said, glared green in the dark like a cat’s; her voice was sometimes so coarse and deep, and her strength so unnatural, that they were often on the point of believing her to be a man in disguise.  She was such a blasphemer, too; and could drink what would lay a trooper under the table, and yet show it in nothing but the superintensity of her Satanic propensities.  She was so malignant, and seemed to bear to all God’s creatures so general a malevolence, that her consistent and superlative wickedness cowed and paralysed them.  The enigma grew more horrible every day and night, and they felt, or fancied, a sort of influence stealing over them which benumbed their faculty of resistance, and altogether unstrung their nerves.

The grand compotation going on in the parlour waxed louder and wilder as the night wore on.  There were unseen guests there, elate and inspiring, who sat with the revellers—­phantoms who attend such wassail, and keep the ladle of the punch-bowl clinking, the tongue of the songster glib and tuneful, and the general mirth alive and furious.  A few honest folk, with the gift of a second sight in such matters, discover their uncanny presence—­leprous impurity, insane blasphemy, and the stony grin of unearthly malice—­and keep aloof.

To heighten their fun, this jovial company bellowed their abominable ballads in the hall, one of them about ‘Sally M’Keogh,’ whose sweetheart was hanged, and who cut her throat with his silver-mounted razor, and they hooted their gibes up the stairs.  And at last Mary Matchwell, provoked by the passive quietude of her victim, summoned the three revellers from the kitchen, and invaded the upper regions at their head—­to the unspeakable terror of poor Sally Nutter—­and set her demon fiddler a scraping, and made them and Dirty Davy’s clerk dance a frantic reel on the lobby outside her bed-room door, locked and bolted inside, you may be sure.

In the midst of this monstrous festivity and uproar, there came, all on a sudden, a reverberating double-knock at the hall-door, so loud and long that every hollow, nook, and passage of the old house rang again.  Loud and untimely as was the summons, it had a character, not of riot, but of alarm and authority.  The uproar was swallowed instantly in silence.  For a second only the light of the solitary candle shone upon the pale, scowling features of Mary Matchwell, and she quenched its wick against the wall.  So the Walpurgis ended in darkness, and the company instinctively held their breaths.

There was a subdued hum of voices outside, and a tramping on the crisp gravel, and the champing and snorting of horses, too, were audible.

‘Does none o’ yez see who’s in it?’ said the blind fiddler.

‘Hold your tongue,’ hissed Mary Matchwell with a curse, and visiting the cunning pate of the musician with a smart knock of the candlestick.