oled slippers and he was coatless,
because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
is the smell of a pleasant powder.

The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.

No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.

Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
place of darkness.

He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantl