"In the quite dark," he offered, dipping down under the clothes so as to
be safe by the time the protecting candle-light wavered out along the
passage and the soft closing of his mother's door assured him that come
what might there was only a wall between him and her.
"And perhaps she won't go to sleep before I go to sleep," he hoped.
At first Mark meditated upon bishops. The perversity of night thoughts
would not allow him to meditate upon the pictures of some child-loving
bishop like St. Nicolas, but must needs fix his contemplation upon a
certain Bishop of Bingen who was eaten by rats. Mark could not remember
why he was eaten by rats, but he could with dreadful distinctness
remember that the prelate escaped to a castle on an island in the middle
of the Rhine, and that the rats swam after him and swarmed in by every
window until his castle was--ugh!--Mark tried to banish from his mind
the picture of the wicked Bishop Hatto and the rats, millions of them,
just going to eat him up. Suppose a lot of rats came swarming up Notting
Hill and unanimously turned to the right into Notting Dale and ate him?
An earthquake would be better than that. Mark began to feel thoroughly
frightened again; he wondered if he dared call out to his mother and put
forward the theory that there actually was a rat in his room.
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