sguised astonishment.

The room in which he found himself was so dark at first that it
yielded little to the eye, and that little seemed altogether beyond his
comprehension. His gaze helplessly followed Celia and her candle
about as she busied herself in the work of illumination. When she had
finished, and pinched out the taper, there were seven lights in the
apartment--lights beaming softly through half-opaque alternating
rectangles of blue and yellow glass. They must be set in some sort of
lanterns around against the wall, he thought, but the shape of these he
could hardly make out.

Gradually his sight adapted itself to this subdued light, and he began
to see other things. These queer lamps were placed, apparently, so as to
shed a special radiance upon some statues which stood in the corners of
the chamber, and upon some pictures which were embedded in the walls.
Theron noted that the statues, the marble of which lost its aggressive
whiteness under the tinted lights, were mostly of naked men and women;
the pictures, four or five in number, were all variations of a single
theme--the Virgin Mary and the Child.

A less untutored vision than his would have caught more swiftly the
scheme of color and line in which these works of art bore their share.
The walls of the room were in part of flat upright wooden columns,
terminating high above in simple capitals, and they were all painted in
pale amber and straw and primrose hues, irregularly wavering here and
there toward suggestions of white. Between these pilasters were broader
panels of stamped leather, in gently varying shades of peacock blue.
These contrasted colors vaguely interwove and mingled in what he
could see of the shadowed ceiling far above. They were repeated in the
draperies and huge cushions and pillows of the low, wide divan which ran
about three sides of the room. Even the floor, where it revealed itself
among the scattered rugs, was laid in a mosaic pattern of matched woods,
which, like the rugs, gave back these same shifting blues and uncertain
yellows.

The fourth side of the apartment was broken in outline at one end by the
door through which they had entered, and at the other by a broad, square
opening, hung with looped-back curtains of a thin silken stuff. Between
the two apertures rose against the wall what Theron took at first glance
to be an altar. There were pyramidal rows of tall candles here on either
side, each masked with a little silken h