after the welfare of the
frightened girl; but when he saw her lying in Bell's lap another feeling
became paramount even to his anxiety for her safety, and he grasped the
curtain again and dashed through into the inner room.

As he had expected, the red woman of the Rue la Reynie Ogniard stood
before him, presenting the same magnificent outline of face and the same
ghastly redness of complexion that she had shown at such a distance of
time and place. In her hand was a white wand, glittering like silver,
with some bright and flashing colorless stone at the end. Her dress, as
he then remembered, had been red when he saw her in Paris, and no relief
to her ghastly color had been shown, except in the mass of dark hair
sweeping down her shoulders. Now her tall and stately form was wrapped
in black, against which her cloud of dark hair was unnoticed. Leslie had
not observed, at any time during the absence of either of the two girls,
any odor of smoke or any appearance of it creeping out from the curtain
into the room; but now, as he looked, he saw white wreaths of vapor
circling near the ceiling and fading away there; and he realized at
once, with the memory of the past in mind, what had been the form in
which the images were presented, producing so startling an effect on
both.

At the moment when he entered, the black girl was just disappearing
through what appeared to be a small door opening out of the room upon
the landing of the stairs, and ordinarily concealed by the sweeping
drapery of dark cloth that was looped around the entire apartment.
Whether the attendant was carrying away any of the properties that might
have been used in the late jugglery, he had, of course, no means of
judging. The sorceress herself, at the moment when he broke in upon her,
was apparently advancing from the little table at which she had been
standing, partially within the sweep of the hangings, towards the
dividing curtain. At sight of the intruder she stopped suddenly and drew
her tall form to its full height, while such a flash of anger appeared
to dart from her keen eyes as would have produced a sensible effect on
any man less used to varying sensations than the cosmopolitan
journalist.

"What do you want?" she asked, and the words came from her lips with the
same short hissing tone that he so well remembered, creating the
impression that there must be a serpent hidden somewhere in the throat
and hissing through what would otherwise be th