“Alas,” answered Adams, who overheard their argument, “what I say is the solemn and sorrowful truth, and which I am speaking for the last time, for I shall never see to-morrow’s blessed sun. As for the door, I will open it to you with my own hands, beseeching you for your own sakes to stand a little apart, and out of the taint of my breath, which is sure destruction. There is one child herein a dead corpse, as you shall behold if you have so much courage, for it lieth unburied in the hall.” So saying he descended, and presently flung open the hall door, the villains withdrawing a little backward, and they saw verily by the light of a rush wick which he carried, that he was lapt only in a white sheet, and looking very pale and ghost-like, with a most dismal black circle round each of his eyes. [Illustration: THE COMMON LOT.] “If ye disbelieve me still,” he said, “look inwards when I draw back from the door, and ye shall see what was a living child this day, but is now a corpse hastening to corruption. Alas! in the midst of life we are in death: she was seized at play.” With these words he drew aside, and the robbers looking through the door, perceived it was even as he said, for the dead body of the child was lying on the hall table, with the same black ring round its eyes, and dressed in brocade and riband as though death had carried it off, even as he said, in its holiday clothes. “Now,” said Adams, after they had gazed awhile, “here be the keys,” therewithal casting towards them a huge bunch; but the villains would now no more meddle with them than with so many aspics or scorpions, looking on them in truth as the very keys of death’s door. Accordingly, after venting a few curses on their ill luck, they began to depart in very ill humour, when Adams again called to them to hear his last words.