im to make immediately for the
secret retreat, and as he considered it inadvisable to press his
argument with the Professor and Edith at that moment, he had lowered his
three prisoners into the devil chamber into which we had accidentally
fallen.

"This is the place you mentioned to me the night you left the camp,"
said the Professor.

"We mentioned?" repeated Holman in amazement. "We didn't know the place
existed till we rolled into it!"

"But you read it out of the note that Soma dropped," cried the
scientist. "Don't you remember where he threatened to put the five
babies?"

"The Black Kindergarten!" I stammered.

"The Black Kindergarten," said the old man. "That is what the inhuman
brute called the place when he lowered us into it. We are to stay here
till I sign papers that will give him possession of my property, and
till--till Edith consents to marry him!"

He flung the words out into the stillness, and for a few minutes no one
spoke. The horror of the situation had the same effect upon me as a blow
from a sandbag. Three days before, we were in possession of Leith's
letter to the one-eyed man, in which he had remarked that we would be
occupants of the place of eternal night, and yet we had not been able to
avert the fate which the brute had in store for us in case the Professor
and Edith Herndon refused to consider his villainous proposals. The
Professor's money and the girl's hand! The words made me physically
sick, and I sat down upon the floor of the place till the dizziness had
passed from my brain.

"And food?" Holman put the question, but the words seemed to come to me
from a great distance.

"He told us he would lower it to us once a day till we--till we came to
our senses," said Edith Herndon quietly. "We received our first supply
some hours ago."

She tried to speak bravely, but the little catch in her voice belied the
courageous front which she endeavoured to assume under cover of the
darkness. Barbara was silent, except for an occasional sob which she was
unable to stifle, while the Professor poured forth his story of Leith's
deception when he first met him in Sydney, and where the big scoundrel
had poured into the ears of the laurel-hungry scientist the tales of
skulls and ruins which he would find upon the Isle of Tears. The skulls
and ruins were there, but it looked as if we would add our own skeletons
to the crumbling bones of the long-dead Polynesians, the peculiarities
of whose whiten