Frau Muller closely followed by Snivelwurst scuttled into the hall like a pair of seedy mice. She was wearing a dressing gown and a nightcap, and carrying a carpetbag—and something seemed to have happened to her face: it had sunk, and her nose and chin had grown closer together. She looked mad, quite deranged, like an inhabitant of Bedlam. She saw me and shrieked and mumbled, pointing angrily—and then I saw that she’d got no teeth. False teeth! I never knew that! She must have left them beside her bed….At any rate, she held her dressing gown away from me and fled. And Snivelwurst…I think, of all the things I’ve ever seen, that was the strangest and the most pathetic. For whether you liked him or loathed him, he was a grown man; and yet he hastened after her, whimpering with fear, and tried to hold her hand….

They dragged the great door wide and vanished through it; and that was the last I saw of them.

Chapter Two

Sunshine, birdsong, the sparkling river, with a blue sky above it all—you’d have thought there was no such being as Zamiel, no such thing as darkness, no such time as midnight. The village looked its very best. The dew—it had been frost a little earlier, but the sun had been at it—gave the stone of the bridge and the houses all the brightness of fresh paint, and the air was tingling just like the water they bottle in Andersbad, further down the valley.

I’d left Frau Wenzel the cook in charge at the castle. She’d heard the terrible sounds from the tower, and she and little Susi Dettweiler, and Johann and Adolphus, were shivering in the kitchen when I came down; and now that Frau Muller and Snivelwurst had disappeared, it was obvious that the old cook was in charge.

But I couldn’t stay there. I had to know what had happened to the girls, and it was in the village that we’d agreed to meet, if everything had gone according to Miss Davenport’s plan. Besides, this was the day of the shooting contest. And there was Peter to think about….I was trembling with impatience and curiosity.

But here was the village green, with no one about as yet; and here was the Jolly Huntsman, with old Conrad swilling down the front step with a bucket and mop, though it was so clean already that you could have eaten your breakfast off it. Breakfast! I nearly fell over with hunger as I thought of it.

“Where’ve you been to?” said old Conrad, stepping down to make room for me to go in. “You mind this step, now. Lift that skirt up—don’t trail it in the water. You’re all muddy and dirty. Where’ve you been?”

“Here and there,” I said. “Has Peter come back yet?”