The other did not budge, but sat hunched up, her head trembling all the time.
They were horrible.

There was something grotesque in their decrepitude.
Their toothless mouths, their hooked noses, the meagreness of the active one, and the hanging yellow cheeks of the other (the still one, whose head trembled) would have been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes, had not gripped one's heart with poignant amazement at the unspeakable misery of age, at the awful persistency of life becoming at last an object of disgust and dread.
To get over it Byrne began to talk, saying that he was an Englishman, and that he was in search of a countryman who ought to have passed this way.
Directly he had spoken the recollection of his parting with Tom came up in his mind with amazing vividness: the silent villagers, the angry gnome, the one-eyed wine-seller, Bernardino.

Why! These two unspeakable frights must be that man's aunts--affiliated to the devil.
Whatever they had been once it was impossible to imagine what use such feeble creatures could be to the devil, now, in the world of the living.
Which was Lucilla and which was Erminia?
They were now things without a name.

A moment of suspended animation followed Byrne's words.

The sorceress with the spoon ceased stirring the mess in the iron pot, the very trembling of the other's head stopped for the space of breath.