Lady Holme looked over the water too, but she saw nothing upon its calm surface.
“Go into the boat-house,” she said.
Paolo nodded without speaking. His lips were parted.
“Chi e la?” she heard him whisper to himself.
They were close to the house now. Its high, pale front, full of shuttered windows, loomed over them, and the roar of the waterfall was loud in their ears. Paolo turned the boat towards his right, and, almost directly, Lady Holme saw a dark opening in the solid stone blocks on which the house was built. The boat glided through it into cover, and the arrow of light at the prow pierced ebon blackness, while the plash of the oars made a curious sound, full of sudden desolation and weariness. A bat flitted over the arrow of light and vanished, and the head of a swimming rat was visible for a moment, pursued by a wrinkle on the water.
“How dark it is here,” Lady Holme said in a low voice. “And what strange noises there are.”
There was terror in the sound of the waterfall heard under this curving roof of stone. It sounded like a quantity of disputing voices, quarrelling in the blackness of the night. The arrow of light lay on a step, and the boat’s prow grated gently against a large ring of rusty iron.
“And you tie up the boat here at night?” she asked as she got up.
“Si, signora.”
While she stood on the step, close to the black water, he passed the rope through the ring, and tied it deftly in a loose knot that any backward movement of the boat would tighten. She watched with profound attention his hands moving quickly in the faint light cast by the lantern.