rself."

"Well?"

"Sandbagged!" explained the man nonchalantly. "Dr. Magnus, who is some
kind of dago, is evidently one of the gang."

"Sir Lionel!" cried Smith--"where does the passage lead to beyond
that doorway?

"God knows!" was the answer, which dashed my last hope to the ground.
"I have no more idea than yourself. Perhaps ..."

He ceased speaking. A sound had interrupted him, which, in those grim
surroundings, lighted by the solitary lantern, translated my thoughts
magically to Ancient Rome, to the Rome of Tigellinus, to the dungeons
of Nero's Circus. Echoing eerily along the secret passages it came--
the roaring and snarling of the lioness and the leopards.

Nayland Smith clapped his hand to his brow and stared at me almost
frenziedly, then--

"God guard her!" he whispered. "Either their plans, wherever they got
them, are inaccurate, or in their panic they have mistaken the way." ...
Wild cries now were mingling with the snarling of the beasts....
"They have blundered into the old crypt!"

How we got out of the secret labyrinth of Graywater Park into the
grounds and around the angle of the west wing to the ivy-grown,
pointed door, where once the chapel had bee, I do not know. Light
seemed to spring up about me, and half-clad servants to appear out of
the void. Temporarily I was insane.

Sir Lionel Barton was behaving like a madman too, and like a madman he
tore at the ancient bolts and precipitated himself into the stone-paved
cloister barred with the moon-cast shadows of the Norman pillars. From
behind the iron bars of the home of the leopards came now a fearsome
growling and scuffling.

Smith held the light with a steady hand, whilst Kennedy forced the
heavy bolts of the crypt door.

In leapt the fearless baronet among his savage pets, and in the ray
of light from the electric lamp I saw that which turned my sick with
horror. Prone beside a yawning gap in the floor lay Homopoulo, his
throat torn indescribably and his white shirt-front smothered in
blood. A black leopard, having its fore-paws upon the dead man's
breast, turned blazing eyes upon us; a second crouched beside him.

Heaped up in a corner of the place, amongst the straw and litter of
the lair, lay the Burmese dacoit, his sinewy fingers embedded in the
throat of the third and largest leopard--which was dead--whilst the
creature's gleaming fangs were buried in the tattered flesh of the
man's shoulder.

Upon the straw beside the two, h