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Clac-clac! clac-clac! a strange, uncanny footstep. It seemed to be hurrying away clac-clac! clac-clac! "Ah, I know," whispered Guida: "it is Dormy Jamais. How foolish of me to be afraid!" "Of course, of course," said Philip "Dormy Jamais, the man who never sleeps." "Philip if he saw us!" "Foolish child, the garden wall is too high for that. Besides " "Yes, Philip?"
Even as these thoughts passed through the lad's mind, the clac-clac had faded away into the murmur of the stream flowing by the Rue d'Egypte to the sea, and almost beneath his feet. There flashed on him at that instant what little Guida Landresse had said a few days before as she lay down beside this very stream, and watched the water wimpling by.
Trailing her fingers through it dreamily, the child had said to him: "Ro, won't it never come back?" She always called him "Ro," because when beginning to talk she could not say Ranulph. Ro, won't it never come back? But while yet he recalled the words, another sound mingled again with the stream-clac-clac! clac-clac!
It was not the tap of a blind man's staff at first he thought it might be; it was not a donkey's foot on the cobbles; it was not the broom-sticks of the witches of St. Clement's Bay, for the rattle was below in the street, and the broom-stick rattle is heard only on the roofs as the witches fly across country from Rocbert to Bonne Nuit Bay. This clac-clac came from the sabots of some nightfarer.
Suddenly it came to him who was the wearer of the sabots making this peculiar clatter in the night. It was Dormy Jamais, the man who never slept. For two years the clac-clac of Dormy Jamais's sabots had not been heard in the streets of St. Heliers he had been wandering in France, a daft pilgrim. Ranulph remembered how these sabots used to pass and repass the doorway of his own home.
So it chanced that soon only Maitresse Aimable came she who asked no questions, desired no secrets and Dormy Jamais. Dormy had of late haunted the precincts of the Place du Vier Prison, and was the only person besides Maitresse Aimable whom Guida welcomed. His tireless feet went clac-clac past her doorway, or halted by it, or entered in when it pleased him.
As he waited, he heard a noise outside, a clac-clac! clac-clac! which seemed to be echoed back from the wood and stone of the houses in the street, and then to be lifted up and carried away over the roofs and out to sea -clac-clac! clac-clac!
Clac-clac! clac-clac! a strange, uncanny footstep. It seemed to be hurrying away clac-clac! clac-clac! "Ah, I know," whispered Guida: "it is Dormy Jamais. How foolish of me to be afraid!" "Of course, of course," said Philip "Dormy Jamais, the man who never sleeps." "Philip if he saw us!" "Foolish child, the garden wall is too high for that. Besides " "Yes, Philip?"
Even as these thoughts passed through the lad's mind, the clac-clac had faded away into the murmur of the stream flowing by the Rue d'Egypte to the sea, and almost beneath his feet. There flashed on him at that instant what little Guida Landresse had said a few days before as she lay down beside this very stream, and watched the water wimpling by.
As he waited, he heard a noise outside, a clac-clac! clac-clac! which seemed to be echoed back from the wood and stone of the houses in the street, and then to be lifted up and carried away over the roofs and out to sea -clac-clac! clac-clac!
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