Knowing that he was plunging into danger, horror, death, he yet followed recklessly, led on by the magic of the woman. And from one side street she would turn off at right angles into another, and from that to another, and so on; and each street was narrower than the last and more gloomy. The brightness and loveliness of the main thoroughfares was not in these. There were no longer the gaily-dressed throngs and the harmony of that universal tune; but these streets were silent, deserted, with dark, moss-grown pavements, in which here and there were pools of black water. The grim houses rose on either side storey upon storey of black, hideous stones, ancient, rotten, crumbling with age; and each storey overlapped the lower, till the upmost of either side of the street met, high, high up, rickety structures of rotten wood from which black rags flaunted. And for thirty feet or so up, there were no windows to these houses--bare, leaning walls alone. After that were the windows, irregular in size and in position, with wooden balconies running along them carved into shapes of grinning monsters. As he advanced from narrower street to narrower, the silence and the sense of impending horror intensified. And the woman brought him to a crevice half-way up in a sort of battlement; a recess which seemed to be her bower wherein to receive her lovers--a foul recess where was a pile of bones, and where the dark mould was discoloured with soaking blood. Then she stopped, turned and looked him in the face; for the first time her features moved--relaxed into a smile, he fled shrieking. * * * * * Again in those horrible narrow stifling alleys, which became darker and filthier as he went on; and though he met no one in them, yet he saw that from each of the innumerable windows there looked out at him the beautiful, melancholy, deadly-white face of a woman, with black eyes as of a basilisk burning out of it. None of the women spoke, or moved, or beckoned, or looked glad or wroth. But he knew, as he passed by them, that they came down the stairs of their houses behind him and followed him. He could not see them or hear them, but he felt their terrible presence. They poured out behind him, silent, invisible crowds ever increasing. He rushed on, but the streets were still ever narrower and loftier; oh, the deadly fear that was on him, the desire to find escape to the broad, bright streets again, and flee this horrible thing! But he could not--it was not to be--not broader but ever narrower were the foul alleys that he hurried through. Would he never come out to the light? Was he altogether cut off? Would he reach some blind alley and be at the mercy of the pursuing crowd?