smell and with it the soft half sob, half laugh of sleeping
children, dreaming in their sleep, and not happy.

I flashed the light around the room. It was not a room but a cavern, a
cave that extended far into the distance, the roof supported by stone
pillars, set at regular intervals. As far as my light would carry I saw
the long rows of white columns.

And to each pillar was bound a man, by chains. They were resting on the
stone floor, twenty or more of them, and all asleep. Snores, grunts and
weary sighs came from them, but not a single eyelid opened. Even when I
flashed the light in their faces their eyes were shut.

And those faces sickened me; white and drawn and filled with the lines
of deep suffering. All were covered with scars; long, narrow, deep
scars, some fresh and red, others old and dead-white. At last, the
sunken eyelids and the inability to see my flashlight and respond told
me the nauseating truth. Those men were all blind.

[Illustration: "Looking eternally into the blackness of his life and
chained to a pillar of stone."]

A pleasant sight! One blind man, looking eternally into the blackness of
his life, and chained to a pillar of stone--that was bad enough; but
multiply that by twenty! Was it worse? Could it be worse? Could twenty
men suffer more than one man? And then a thought came to me, a terrible,
impossible thought, so horrible that I doubted my logic. But now two and
two were beginning to make four. Could those men be the _masters_? They
came and bought and left--to go to the cellar and stay there!

"Oh! Donna Marchesi!" I whispered. "How about those cat-eyes? If you had
a hand in this, you are not a woman. You are a tiger."

* * * * *

I thought that I understood part of it. The latest master came to her
for the key to the cellar, and then, when he once passed through the
door he never left. She and her servants were not there to welcome me
that night, because she did not know that I had a key.

The thought came to me that perhaps one of those sleeping men was George
Seabrook. He and I used to play tennis together and we knew each other
like brothers. He had a large scar on the back of his right hand; a
livid star-shaped scar. With that in mind, I walked carefully from
sleeping man to sleeping man, looking at their right hands. And I found
a right hand with a scar that was shaped like the one I knew so well.
But that blind man, only a skin-covered skel