air of
the man who was amused to call himself Doctor Satan. And it stirred
still more as he tried the knob.

The door was unlocked.

He looked at it for several minutes. A lock wouldn't have mattered to
Keane, and Satan knew that as well as Keane himself. Nevertheless, to
leave the door invitingly open like this was almost too obliging!

He opened the door and stepped in, bracing himself for instant attack.
But no attack of any kind was forthcoming. The front hall in which he
found himself was deserted. Indeed, the whole house had that curiously
breathless feeling encountered in homes for the moment untenanted.

Down the hall was an open double doorway. Keane stared that way. He
himself could not have told how he knew, but know he did, that beyond
that doorway lay what he had come to find. He walked toward it.

Behind him, the street door opened again, very slowly and cautiously. An
eye was put close to the resultant crack. The eye was dark, exotically
lovely. It fastened on Keane's back.

Keane stared in through the doorway. He was gazing into a library,
dimmed by drawn shades. He entered it, with every nerve-end in his body
silently shrieking of danger.

The street door softly closed after admitting a figure that moved on
soundless feet. A woman, with a face like a pale flower on an exquisite
throat. Madame Sin.

Her face was as serenely lovely as ever. Not by a line had it changed.
And yet, subtly, it had become a mask of beautiful death. Her eyes were
death's dark fires as she moved without a sound down the hall toward the
library. In her tapering hands was the gold-link bag.

* * * * *

In the library, Keane stood with beating heart over two stark, still
bodies that lay on the thick carpet near a flat-topped desk. One was
wizened, lank, a little undersized, with dry-looking skin. It was the
body of Chichester. At first it seemed a corpse, but then Keane saw the
chest move with slow, deep breaths, as the breast of the woman back at
the hotel had moved.

But it was not this figure that made Keane's heart thud and his hands
clench. It was the other.

This was a taller figure, lying on its back with hands folded. The hands
were red-gloved. The face was concealed by a red mask. The body was
draped by a red cloak. From the head sprang two little knobs, or
projections, like Lucifer's horns. Doctor Satan himself!

"It's my chance," whispered Keane. "Satan--sending his soul and