Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/350

out that the iron spike was indeed plucked from its socket, and left, moreover, another ragged hole into some hollow place behind. But for this MacIan’s cell was the duplicate of Turnbull’s—a long oblong ending in a wedge and lined with cold and lustrous tiles. The small hole from which the peg had been displaced was in that short oblique wall at the end nearest to Turnbull’s. That individual looked at it with a puzzled face.

“What is in there?” he asked.

MacIan answered briefly: “Another cell.”

“But where can the door of it be?” said his companion, even more puzzled; “the doors of our cells are at the other end.”

“It has no door,” said Evan.

In the pause of perplexity that followed, an eerie and sinister feeling crept over Turnbull’s stubborn soul in spite of himself. The notion of the doorless room chilled him with that sense of half-witted curiosity which one has when something horrible is half understood.

“James Turnbull,” said MacIan, in a low and shaken voice, “these people hate us more than Nero hated Christians, and fear us more than any man feared Nero. They have filled England with