We followed a gray stone path. The Castle loomed ahead, with walls some thirty feet high. They stretched out seemingly for several hundred feet--a squat, but widely spreading structure; its walls were turreted at the angles; the windows all seemed guarded with interlaced metal bars. A frowning prison of a building. A black vegetation clung to the walls. There were small doorways along the ground at intervals--black, barred openings with tiny lights in canopies over them. We tried to keep together. Arturo stayed always close by Nereid, fending her off from the milling crowd. It was a threatening mob, here in the garden. Aimless, apparently without a leader. It milled and struggled, men and women brandishing implements of the field, or huge sticks, and shouting aimless threats. There were many, recovered of the blindness, who fought to press forward. There were others, still blind and in terror, who strove to run away, or sat upon the ground in huddled fright. And still others, lying inert, wholly unnoticed by their fellows. I whispered to Tad: “Where are we going?” “Up closer. I don’t know.” Bhool whiningly suggested: “This way, masters--” We faced a broad front entrance to the Castle. A low flight of stone steps led ten feet up to it. Gray figures of women stood in the shadows up there, like guards. There seemed no more than four or five of them. They stood in the entrance way; vaguely to be seen in its shadows--stood silent and motionless. There was about them, these motionless figures, something queerly sinister, as though they held a power that made them impregnable to all this threatening crowd. The Castle itself had that sinister aspect. Its grim silence; its inactivity. It stood, here in the gloom, silently confident. I felt, too, as I gazed at it, an inward sense of fear. A revulsion. As though within these darkly brooding walls fearsome things must have transpired. * * * * * The more courageous of the mob had surged toward the entrance steps which now we were facing. They stood in a ring near the bottom of the steps. But there seemed a deadline beyond which none dared pass; the ground twenty feet out from the front of the steps was all clear. The mob stood calling imprecations and brandishing weapons, but not advancing. Waiting for a leader, perhaps. Occasionally some one would rush forward, or be thrust forward by those behind. But after a step or two, the would-be leader always retreated. And up in the entrance way the gray Gian women never moved. Fen--with Bhool urging him sidewise--led us toward the steps; the crowd was so dense we were soon struggling to advance. I was literally wading through these little people; their bodies felt frail and slight as I roughly thrust them aside. I called: “Arturo, let me over there.” I joined him, to guard Nereid in the jam.