“What is in there?” he asked.

MacIan answered briefly:  “Another cell.”

“But where can the door of it be?” said his companion, even more puzzled; “the doors of our cells are at the other end.”

“It has no door,” said Evan.

In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling crept over Turnbull’s stubborn soul in spite of himself.  The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is half understood.

“James Turnbull,” said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, “these people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man feared Nero.  They have filled England with frenzy and galloping in order to capture us and wipe us out—­in order to kill us.  And they have killed us, for you and I have only made a hole in our coffins.  But though this hatred that they felt for us is bigger than they felt for Bonaparte, and more plain and practical than they would feel for Jack the Ripper, yet it is not we whom the people of this place hate most.”

A cold and quivering impatience continued to crawl up Turnbull’s spine; he had never felt so near to superstition and supernaturalism, and it was not a pretty sort of superstition either.

“There is another man more fearful and hateful,” went on MacIan, in his low monotone voice, “and they have buried him even deeper.  God knows how they did it, for he was let in by neither door nor window, nor lowered through any opening above.  I expect these iron handles that we both hate have been part of some damned machinery for walling him up.  He is there.  I have looked through the hole at him; but I cannot stand looking at him long, because his face is turned away from me and he does not move.”

Al Turnbull’s unnatural and uncompleted feelings found their outlet in rushing to the aperture and looking into the unknown room.

It was a third oblong cell exactly like the other two except that it was doorless, and except that on one of the walls was painted a large black A like the B and C outside their own doors.  The letter in this case was not painted outside, because this prison had no outside.

On the same kind of tiled floor, of which the monotonous squares had maddened Turnbull’s eye and brain, was sitting a figure which was startlingly short even for a child, only that the enormous head was ringed with hair of a frosty grey.  The figure was draped, both insecurely and insufficiently, in what looked like the remains of a brown flannel dressing-gown; an emptied cup of cocoa stood on the floor beside it, and the creature had his big grey head cocked at a particular angle of inquiry or attention which amid all that gathering gloom and mystery struck one as comic if not cocksure.