returned, the two phantoms were as if in the grasp of the Shadow that towered between them; and there was a bloodstain on the breast of the female; and the phantom-male was leaning on its phantom-sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace; and the darkness of the intermediate Shadow swallowed them up—­they were gone.  And again the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated, growing thicker and thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.

The closet-door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the aperture there came the form of a woman, aged.  In her hand she held letters—­the very letters over which I had seen the Hand close; and behind her I heard a footstep.  She turned round as if to listen, then she opened the letters and seemed to read; and over her shoulder I saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned—­bloated, bleached—­seaweed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of a corpse and beside the corpse there cowered a child, a miserable, squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes.  And as I looked in the old woman’s face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth—­hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had darkened over the last.

Nothing now was left but the Shadow, and on that my eyes were intently fixed, till again eyes grew out of the Shadow—­malignant, serpent eyes.  And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight.  And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water—­things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other—­forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye.  As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order.  In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings.

Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands touched me.  Once I felt the clutch as of cold soft fingers at my throat.  I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I should be in bodily peril; and I concentrated all my faculties in the single focus of resisting, stubborn will.  And I turned my sight from the Shadow—­above all, from those strange serpent eyes—­eyes that had now become distinctly visible.  For there, though in nought else around me, I was aware that there was a will, and a will of intense, creative, working evil, which might crush down my own.