, narrow table, spread
with a cloth and set with platters and cups of silver. Here we waited
till butlers with wands appeared through some curtains which they drew.
Then came a man beating a silver gong, and after him a dozen or more
courtiers, all dressed in white robes like ourselves, followed by
perhaps as many ladies, some of them young and good-looking, and for
the most part of a fair type, with well-cut features, though others were
rather yellow-skinned. They bowed to us and we to them.

Then there was a pause while we studied one another, till a trumpet blew
and heralded by footmen in a kind of yellow livery, two figures were
seen advancing down the passage beyond the curtains, preceded by the
Shaman Simbri and followed by other officers. They were the Khan and the
Khania of Kaloon.

No one looking at this Khan as he entered his dining-hall clad in festal
white attire would have imagined him to be the same raving human
brute whom we had just seen urging on his devilish hounds to tear a
fellow-creature and a helpless horse to fragments and devour them. Now
he seemed a heavy, loutish man, very strongly built and not ill-looking,
but with shifty eyes, evidently a person of dulled intellect, whom one
would have thought incapable of keen emotions of any kind. The Khania
need not be described. She was as she had been in the chambers of the
Gate, only more weary looking; indeed her eyes had a haunted air and
it was easy to see that the events of the previous night had left
their mark upon her mind. At the sight of us she flushed a little, then
beckoned to us to advance, and said to her husband--"My lord, these are
the strangers of whom I have told you."

His dull eyes fell upon me first, and my appearance seemed to amuse him
vaguely, at any rate he laughed rudely, saying in barbarous Greek mixed
with words from the local patois--"What a curious old animal! I have
never seen you before, have I?"

"No, great Khan," I answered, "but I have seen you out hunting this
night. Did you have good sport?"

Instantly he became wide awake, and answered, rubbing his
hands--"Excellent. He gave us a fine run, but my little dogs caught him
at last, and then----" and he snapped his powerful jaws together.

"Cease your brutal talk," broke in his wife fiercely, and he slunk away
from her and in so doing stumbled against Leo, who was waiting to be
presented to him.

The sight of this great, golden-bearded man seemed to astonish him,