e long look at the scene in the fourth room, and a great
wave of unbelief rolled across his mind. Through this long day of
shocks and surprises, he had reached that stage of amazedness where the
evidential value of sensory impressions is destroyed. He covered his
eyes with his hands, expecting that the phantasms before him might pass
with vision, and that with vision's return might come the dear,
familiar commonplaces of his commonplace life.

The room seemed to have no windows, and the roar of the New York street
outside was gone, or faint as the hum of a hive. The walls were hung
with fabrics of wool or silk, in dull greens and reds, and the floor
was spread with rugs. With mouth redly ravening at him, and eyes
emitting opalescent gleams, lay a great tiger-skin rug, upon which, on
a kind of dais, sat a woman--a woman whose eyes sought his in a steady
regard which flashed a thrill through his whole body as he gazed. For
she seemed to emanate from the tiger-skin, as a butterfly from the
chrysalis.

[Illustration: She seemed to emanate from the tiger-skin, as a
butterfly from the chrysalis.]

Her dress was of some combination of black and yellow which carried
upward the tones of the great rug. Her bare arms--long, and tapering
to lithe wrists and hands--were clasped by dull-gold bracelets of
twisted serpents. Over shapely shoulders, the flesh of which looked
white and young, there was thrown a wrap like feathery snow, from under
which drooped down over the girlish bosom a necklace that seemed of
pearl. The face was fair, its pallor tinged with red at lips, and rose
on cheeks. The eyes, luminous and steady, shone out through heavy dark
lashes, from under brows of black, and seemed, at that first glance, of
oriental darkness. A great mass of dark-brown hair encircled the
rather small face, and even in his first look, he noted at the temples
twin strands of golden-blond which, carried out like rays in the fluffy
halo about her brow, reappeared in all the twistings and turnings of
the involved pile which crowned the graceful head. The
yellow-and-black of the tiger appeared thus, from head to foot. It was
afterward that he found out something of the secret of the peculiar
fascination in the great dark eyes. One of them was gray, with that
greenish tinge which has been regarded as the token of genius. The
other was of a mottled golden-brown, with lights like those in the
tiger's eye. In both, in any but stron