Her heart began to beat more rapidly. Cautiously she turned over, feeling certain already of what she would see. There, on the pillow next to hers was a man's head. The hair on it was crew-cut and so fair as to be almost white. The face was turned towards her but inclined downwards, its lower part concealed by the top of the folded sheet. Under the hair-line there was a good forehead - broad rather than high - two thick, fair eyebrows and, between them, a great hooked nose. Her bedfellow was fast asleep and breathing so gently that she had to listen to catch the sound.

Chaotic memories of the previous night's events were now tumbling about in her mind: Abaddon, with his strangler's fit upon him, gripping her by the throat; Ratnadatta wearing her murdered husband's shoes; Pope Honorius forcing her to swallow the aphrodisiac; the middle-aged grey-haired man for whom she had been made to play the role of prophetess; Ratnadatta again, and her desperate struggle with him; her boundless relief when she found herself outside the temple in the cool night air, and believed that the American was going to take her home. But he hadn't. Instead he had suddenly decided to compound with his infernal master for not attending the Walpurgis Eve Sabbat by performing some special sacrifice on his own. Then he had said that he would give her the night of her life. Well, in a sense, he had.

As he had headed the car back and turned north-west along the Fulham Road, she knew that after the act which she had so rashly just put on - of appearing disappointed that he meant only to run her home then return to the Temple - she could not possibly revoke on that and suddenly declare that she felt too tired for love-making. She knew instinctively too that, even if she had attempted to make him change his mind, now he had decided to take her down to the country nothing she could say would stop him.