Where the light fell brightest these became plainer, their eyes shone in jeweled points of color.
"By Jove, Gilly, they are rats!" said Heywood, in a voice curiously forced and matter-of-fact.

"Flounce killed several this afternoon, so my--" No one heeded him; all stared.

The rats, like beings of incantation, stole about with an absence of fear, a disregard of man's presence, that was odious and alarming.
"Earthquake ?" The elder Englishman spoke as though afraid of disturbing some one.
The French doctor shook his head.
"No," he answered in the same tone.

"Look." The rats, in all their weaving confusion, displayed one common impulse.
They sprang upward continually, with short, agonized leaps, like drowning creatures struggling to keep afloat above some invisible flood.
The action, repeated multitudinously into the obscure background, exaggerated in the foreground by magnified shadows tossing and falling on the white walls, suggested the influence of some evil stratum, some vapor subtle and diabolic, crawling poisonously along the ground.
Heywood stamped angrily, without effect.

Wutzler stood abject, a magician impotent against his swarm of familiars.