At all events the door opened again, almost at once and as noiselessly as before. Hartnoll and I squeezed our bodies back in the foggy shadow, and I heard a voice ask, "Is that Smithers?" To this Meliar-Ann made some response which I could not catch, but its effect was to make the voice--a woman's--break out in a string of querulous cursings. "Drat the child!" it said (or rather, it said something much stronger which I won't repeat before the Rector. Eh, Rector--what's that you say? _Maxima debetur pueris_--oh, make yourself easy: I won't corrupt their morals). "Drat the child!" it said, then, or words to that effect. "Bothering here at this time of night, when Bill's been a-bed this hour and a half, and time you was the same." To this Meliar-Ann made, and audibly, the briefest possible answer. She said, "You lie." "Strike me dead!" replied the woman's voice in the doorway. "You lie," repeated the child; "and you'd best belay to that. Bill's been stealin' and got himself into trouble . . . a midshipman's dirk, it was, and he was seen taking it. I've run all this way to warn him. . . ." The two voices fell to muttering. "You can slip inside if you like and tell him quietly," said the woman after a while. "He's upstairs and asleep too, for all I know. If he brought any such thing home with him _I_ never saw it, and to that I'll take my oath." But here another and still angrier voice--a virago's--broke in from the passage behind, demanding to know if the door was being kept open to invite the whole town. The child stood her ground on the doorstep. An instant later a hand reached out, clutched her--it seemed by the hair-- and dragged her inside. Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of heavy blows-- "Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll. I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into the passage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us. At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down the passage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming. The child, borne forward by our combined weight, tottered and fell almost across the threshold of this room, where a flight of stairs, lit by a dingy lamp, led up into obscure darkness. On the third stair under the lamp I caught a momentary vision of a dirty, half-naked boy standing with a drawn dirk in his hand, and with that, my foot catching against Meliar-Ann's body, I pitched past, head foremost, into the lighted room. As I fell I heard, or seemed to hear, a scuffle of feet, followed by a shout from Hartnoll behind us--"My dirk! You dirty young villain!"--and another stampede, this time upon the stairway. Then, all of a sudden, the room was quiet, and I picked myself up and fell back against the door-post, face to face with half a dozen women.