For the Cut-rate had not cut his salary, which, sordidly speaking,
ranked him star boarder at the Peek's. And he thought of Captain
Peek, Katie's father, a man he dreaded and abhorred; a genteel
loafer and spendthrift, battening upon the labour of his women-folk;
a very queer fish, and, according to repute, not of the freshest.

The night had turned chill and foggy. The heart of the town, with
its noises, was left behind. Reflected from the high vapours, its
distant lights were manifest in quivering, cone-shaped streamers, in
questionable blushes of unnamed colours, in unstable, ghostly waves
of far, electric flashes. Now that the darkness was become more
friendly, the wall against which the street splintered developed a
stone coping topped with an armature of spikes. Beyond it loomed
what appeared to be the acute angles of mountain peaks, pierced here
and there by little lambent parallelograms. Considering this vista,
Tansey at length persuaded himself that the seeming mountains were,
in fact, the convent of Santa Mercedes, with which ancient and
bulky pile he was better familiar from different coigns of view. A
pleasant note of singing in his ears reinforced his opinion. High,
sweet, holy carolling, far and harmonious and uprising, as of
sanctified nuns at their responses. At what hour did the Sisters
sing? He tried to think--was it six, eight, twelve? Tansey leaned
his back against the limestone wall and wondered. Strange things
followed. The air was full of white, fluttering pigeons that circled
about, and settled upon the convent wall. The wall blossomed with a
quantity of shining green eyes that blinked and peered at him from
the solid masonry. A pink, classic nymph came from an excavation in
the cavernous road and danced, barefoot and airy, upon the ragged
flints. The sky was traversed by a company of beribboned cats,
marching in stupendous, aërial procession. The noise of singing grew