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Valerie thought the strange creature would execute his threat there and then.
    “Are you going to jump down?”
    “For the villainy you’ve committed against me, Constable, I should send you to hell.”
    “I have acted as moderately as I could, you scoundrel,” said the constable, and he was preparing to spout another stream of abuse when Orlík, who understood the old man very well, jumped to the ground.
    “Your punishment awaits you,” the centenarian snarled.
    “Did you not pull the ladder out from under me in the vault so that I would break my neck?”
    “You always talk too much,” the young man remarked.
    “If you foil my plans once more with your infamy, believe me, I will have absolutely no mercy on you.”
    After this exchange the men left.
     
     
    Chapter IX
THE WORK OF DEATH
     
    Valerie heaved a sigh of relief. She thought she was out of any immediate danger. Though what she had seen and heard weighed on her like a boulder. She clasped the cold phial and repeated to herself what Orlík had whispered. Yet as she had noted several times during the course of that fateful evening, the boy was beginning to lose his peculiar power over her, a power that had compelled her to utter his name over and over after she had read his letter. She was fairly certain she would not obey him, nor would she drink the liquid whose effect she feared.
    She finally decided to abandon her hiding place behind the crate and step over it.
    Yet when she looked around the henhouse, she was overcome with horror. By the light of the moon she saw one bird, for whom she had scattered grain only that morning, writhing in convulsions. The spasm was short-lived. The hen stretched out its neck, twitched its legs desperately one last time and was dead. The girl’s heart filled with pity and her eyes with tears.
    “Who did this to you, my poor innocent creature?” she said and looked away from the dead bird.
    Suddenly she saw the full extent of the destruction. There were so many dead hens in the henhouse that she shrieked in terror and covered her eyes.
    It appeared the Polecat was not the one to blame for this work of death; after all, he hadn’t even climbed inside.
    Valerie fled in fright from the strange poultry graveyard, where Orlík had claimed she was safe. Under her arm she gripped the clothes she had so imprudently, as if suffering from blindness, lent the young man, and timidly followed her grandmother’s footsteps, a woman she no longer saw as a kindly, virtuous woman, but as a grasping monster. Now she was supposed to meet her. She would not know how to look at her. Her face flushed red at the thought that she would have to call the old woman “Grandma.” She felt the victim of a conspiracy.
    The stars were shining brightly. How wonderful it would be to sit in a carriage and have it take her far away, to someplace without these strange beings who terrified her!
    As she reached the steps, she thought she heard a noise like a piece snapping off the metallic firmament. She held her breath and listened intently. The noise came again. Only then did she realize that it was the sound of bells set swinging by some inept person’s unsteady hand.
    “They’re looking for me in the tower,” she thought, and though her shame would not permit her to view her home as affording solace, she crossed the threshold and went into the house, which the old lady had resolved to transfer to the superhuman old brute, whose gaze Valerie was unable to shake.
    “Oh, Miss Valerie,” said the maid, “your grandmother’s expecting you, she’s in the dining room. Though I think you ought to get changed first,” she added with a hint of mockery, glancing sideways at the cobwebs clinging to the girl’s sleeves.
     
     
    Chapter X
DINNER
     
    Grandmother threw Valerie a hateful look. At the table sat the missionary, fingering his rosary.
    “This is my granddaughter,” she said dryly.
    “Sit down, my dear,” said the cleric.
    “Where have