it chance alone that led you to choose
Isolde's "Liebestod" for this the supreme enchantment?

The music fell away into nothingness and I stepped forward, my hand on
the knob of the folding-doors that led to the front room. I knocked
twice--firmly, insistently. "Open!" I cried, and immediately the
door-knob yielded to my touch.

"Stop!"

Dr. Gonzales stood at the hall entrance to the drawing-room. I saw
something that gleamed like polished metal in his uplifted hand. Then
he fell back and disappeared. It seemed as though some invisible force
behind the portiere had taken sudden and irresistible possession of
him. What did I care. I went forward and into the room, absolutely
empty save for an upright cabinet of mahogany placed on a central
pedestal. It was tall enough to conceal a person standing behind it,
but it was not the Lady Allegra who came forward to meet me.

"Indiman!" I said, weakly. "Esper Indiman!"

"The carriage is waiting," he said. "Come."

"Never!" I retorted, passionately. "You don't understand--the
Lady--Allegra--"

Well, I suppose I must have fainted from sheer inanition, and so
Indiman explained it himself that next morning.

"You had been half starved for over a week, and no wonder you keeled
over. No; you can't have another mouthful of that beef-steak. You'll
have to wait for luncheon."

I sank back among the cushions of the couch rather resentfully. "Well,
at least you can go on and tell me," I said.

"Certainly. There are cranks of all degrees, as you know. It was your
luck to fall into the hands of one of the king-pins of the
confraternity--Dr. Ferdinand Gonzales, alias Moses the Second.

"He wanted a new subject for his experiments upon the physical
regeneration of the human race, and he caught you in his drag-net. It
was a close call for you, old chap."

"I don't understand."

"You have been starving to death for ten days, and yet eating three
meals a day right along. Nothing peculiar about that, eh?"

"It WAS rather curious stuff. It looked like isinglass."

"Perhaps it is. All I care about is the fact that the food you have
been eating doesn't contain a particle of nourishment for the human
system. But Moses the Second imagined that he had invented, or rather
rediscovered, the one perfect nutriment for the race--nothing less than
manna."

"Manna!"

"Don't you remember the manna in the wilderness, the children of
Israel, and the forty years they fed upon it. Dr. Gonzale