e door against which he stood.

It led into a winding passage of such a totally different character
from the stone staircase they had just mounted that Juliet stood gazing
down it for some seconds before she obeyed his mute gesture to pass
through. It was thickly carpeted, deadening all sound, and the walls
were hung with some heavy material, in the colour of old oak. It was
lighted by three long perpendicular slits of windows, let into a
twelve-foot thickness of wall. Juliet had a glimpse of many pine trees
as she passed them.

The passage ended in heavy curtains of the same dark-brown material. She
stopped and looked at her companion.

"What is it?" he said, with a laugh. "Are you afraid of my inner
sanctuary?"

He parted the curtains, disclosing a tall oak door. She saw no latch upon
it, but his hand went up behind the curtain, and she heard the click of a
spring. In a moment the tall door opened before her.

"Go in!" he said easily.

She entered a strange room, oak-panelled, shaped like a cone, lighted
only by a glass dome in the roof. It was the most curious chamber she
had ever seen. She trod on a tiger-skin as she entered, and noted that
the floor was covered with them. There was no chair anywhere, only a
long, deep couch, also draped with tiger-skins. Tiger faces glared at
her from all directions. She heard the door click behind her and
turning realized that it had disappeared in the oak panelling against
which her host was standing.

He laughed at her quizzically, "I believe you are frightened."

She looked around her, seeing no exit anywhere. "It is just the sort of
freak apartment I should expect you to delight in," she said.

"You wouldn't have come if you had known, would you?" he said, a faint
note of jeering in his voice.

"Of course I should!" said Juliet.

"Of course!" he mocked. "I am such a peculiarly safe person, am I not?
Every member of your charming sex trusts me instinctively."

She turned and faced him. "Don't be ridiculous, Charles! You see, I
happen to know you."

He looked at her with something of the air of a monkey that contemplates
snatching some forbidden thing. "Why did you run away?" he said.

She hesitated. "That's a hard question, isn't it?"

"Oh, don't mind me!" he said. "I don't flatter myself I was the cause."

Her dark brows were slightly drawn. "No, you were not," she said. "It was
just--it was Lady Jo herself, Charlie. No one else."

"Ah!" His goblin smile f