; his back,
pitifully thin under a spare white shirt, was turned toward me. With one
sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with
the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely
monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary game of
chess!

"The Sheik of Baalbec!" I whispered to myself.

The creature stopped, looked up at the skylight and its green curtains
and drew a miserable sigh from the depths of his lungs. It was such a
sigh that I could not restrain a shudder.

"Julianna," said I.

He drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened turtle and
held himself stiffly as one who has been doused with a pail of ice
water. For several moments he did not move; when at last he turned
around, his expression was patient rather than vicious, sad rather than
terror-stricken.

"What do you want?" he said, and held his mouth open so that he, too,
seemed like an automaton, the springs of which had failed.

The pause gave me the opportunity to observe that he was not the man
with the gold fillings. Indeed, the only part of him which seemed well
preserved--which, as it were, he had saved from the wreck--was a row of
white, even teeth!

"What do you want?" he repeated. "I have never seen you before. I know
no reason for your speaking a word to me."

"Your daughter--" I began.

"I have no daughter," he cried, his eyes blazing with sudden passion.
"Who are you? I tell you that you are talking nonsense. I have no
daughter!"

"Fine words," I said threateningly; "fine words. But this is no time for
them. She is in vital danger--"

"Danger!" he screamed, clawing at the red blankets. "My God! Has it
come? What form? Quick, I say! What form?"

"It is because you can shed light upon it that I have come," said I. "We
know little. She has sent her husband away--"

"Damn him!" he choked.

"She has locked herself in her room. She has been so for three weeks.
The maid--"

"Margaret Murchie," he whispered. "She believes that I am dead?"

I nodded.

"I know nothing," he said. "The girl is not of me or mine."

"Come, come," said I. "It is time for disclosure."

He arose, searched under the corner of the mattress a moment, and then,
with a quick, panther-like movement, sprang upon the bed again, holding
a revolver in his two claws.

"I have no idea of what you mean," he cried. "I will not be questioned.
If I shoot, it is self-defense. You understand th