you would not have told me," she replied, "at least you would
not have told me the truth."

"For a price," he said, "the truth would have been yours for the asking.
For a different price it is yours now."

Again without noticeable movement he seemed to have drawn nearer. The
edge of that cool ebony cabinet seemed to be burning her fingers. Try
however hard, she could not frame the question which had risen to her
lips.

"The price," he continued, "is you--yourself. A few hours ago it was
your love I craved for. Now it is yourself."

He was so near to her now that she faced the steady radiance of his
wonderful eyes, so near that she could trace the faint lines about his
mouth, the strong, stern immobility of his perfectly shaped,
olive-tinted features.

"You are too wonderful," he went on, "to remain a daughter of the crude
West. I want to take you back with me to the land where life still moves
to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these
struggling hordes. You shall live in a palace where the perfume of
flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a
palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are
banished because we alone have found the key to the garden of
happiness."

He raised his hand, and it seemed as though unseen eyes watched them
from every quarter. The silken curtains through which he had issued were
drawn back by invisible hands, and the inner apartment was disclosed.
Its faint illumination was obscured with purple shades. There was a high
lacquer bedstead, with little ivory ladders on either side, a bedstead
hung with silks of black and purple and mauve. There was a huge couch, a
shrine opposite the bed, in which was a kneeling figure of black marble.
A faint odour, as though from thousand-year-old sachets, very faint
indeed and yet with its mead of intoxication, seemed to steal out from
the room, which had borrowed from its curious hangings, its marvellous
adornments, its strangely attuned atmosphere, all the mysticism of a
fabled world.

"You have come," he said. "Will you stay?" The inertia seemed suddenly
to leave her limbs. She threw up her head as though gasping for air,
escaped, somehow or other, from the thrall of his eyes, and passed
across the smooth floor with flying footsteps. Her fingers seized the
handle of the door and turned it, only to find it held by some invisible
fastening. She shook it passionately. There was n