It was certainly after midnight when Maria looked from her doorway; for the moon was tottering on the western wall, and while she stood looking, slowly it dropped over and vanished.
The vague forebodings that she had felt when she talked to Crown earlier in the evening had kept sleep from her; with each passing hour her fears increased, and with them a sense of imminence that finally forced her to get up, slip on a wrapper, and prepare to make the rounds of the court.
But on opening her door, she was at once reassured. The square stood before her like a vast cistern brimmed with misty dark and roofed with a lid of sky. A cur grovelled forward on its belly from a near-by nook, and licked one of her bare feet with its moist, warm tongue.
Above her, in the huge honeycomb of the building, someone was snoring in a slow, steady rhythm.
The big negress drew a deep sigh of relief and turned back toward her room.
A sound of cracking wood snapped the silence. Then, like a flurry of small bells, came a shiver of broken glass on the stones.
Maria spun around, and tried to locate the sound; but no noise followed. Silence flowed back over the court and settled pal-
