ood; below, in the centre, a
shelf-like projection supported what seemed a massive, carved casket,
and in the beautiful intricacies of this, and the receding canopy of
delicate ornamentation which depended above it, the dominant color was
white, deepening away in its shadows, by tenderly minute gradations, to
the tints which ruled the rest of the room.

Celia lighted some of the high, thick tapers in these candelabra, and
opened the top of the casket. Theron saw with surprise that she had
uncovered the keyboard of a piano. He viewed with much greater amazement
her next proceeding--which was to put a cigarette between her lips, and,
bending over one of the candles with it for an instant, turn to him with
a filmy, opalescent veil of smoke above her head.

"Make yourself comfortable anywhere," she said, with a gesture which
comprehended all the divans and pillows in the place. "Will you smoke?"

"I have never tried since I was a little boy," said Theron, "but I think
I could. If you don't mind, I should like to see."

Lounging at his ease on the oriental couch, Theron experimented
cautiously upon the unaccustomed tobacco, and looked at Celia with what
he felt to be the confident quiet of a man of the world. She had thrown
aside her hat, and in doing so had half released some of the heavy
strands of hair coiled at the back of her head. His glance instinctively
rested upon this wonderful hair of hers. There was no mistaking the
sudden fascination its disorder had for his eye.

She stood before him with the cigarette poised daintily between thumb
and finger of a shapely hand, and smiled comprehendingly down on her
guest.

"I suffered the horrors of the damned with this hair of mine when I was
a child," she said. "I daresay all children have a taste for persecuting
red-heads; but it's a specialty with Irish children. They get hold
somehow of an ancient national superstition, or legend, that red hair
was brought into Ireland by the Danes. It's been a term of reproach with
us since Brian Boru's time to call a child a Dane. I used to be pursued
and baited with it every day of my life, until the one dream of my
ambition was to get old enough to be a Sister of Charity, so that I
might hide my hair under one of their big beastly white linen caps. I've
got rather away from that ideal since, I'm afraid," she added, with a
droll downward curl of her lip.

"Your hair is very beautiful," said Theron, in the calm tone of a
connois