"With Mr. Hamar?" Kelson asked suspiciously.

"Oh no! my own private business," Lilian Rosenberg replied. "Do
forgive me. I should so like to have been able to accept your
invitation. Now I must hurry back to my work," and she gave him her
hand, which Kelson held, and would have gone on holding all the
morning, had he not heard Hamar's well-known tread ascending the
stairs.

"Look here!" he said, as they entered his room together, "I want Miss
Rosenberg to have luncheon with me one day this week, and she tells me
you have already invited her. Let her come with me to-morrow."

"It is impossible," Hamar said. "Now I'll tell you what it is, Matt, I
anticipated this the moment I saw you two together, and its got to
stop. You would genuinely fall in love with that girl--or as a matter
of fact any other pretty girl--if you saw much of her--and love, I
tell you, would be absolutely disastrous to our interests. You must
let her alone--absolutely alone, I tell you. I have given her strict
orders she is to confine herself to her work, and to me."

"I think you take a great deal too much on yourself. I shall see just
as much of Miss Rosenberg, when she is disengaged, as I please."

"Then she never shall be disengaged. But come, do be sane and put some
restraint on this mad infatuation of yours for pretty faces. Can't you
keep it in check anyhow for two years--till after the term of the
compact has expired! Then you will be free to indulge in it, to your
heart's content. For Heaven's sake, be guided by me. Harmony between
us must be kept at all costs. Don't you understand?"

"Oh, yes! I understand all right," Kelson said, "and I'll try. But
it's very hard--and I really don't see there would be any danger in my
taking her out occasionally."

"Well, I do," Hamar replied, "and there's an end. To turn to something
that may spell business. Just before I got up this morning I saw a
striped figure bending over me!"

"A striped figure?"

"Yes! A cylindrical figure, about seven feet high, without any visible
limbs; but which gave me the impression it had limbs--of a sort--if it
cared to show them."

"You were frightened?"

"Naturally! So would you have been. It didn't speak, but in some
indefinable manner it conveyed to me the purport of its visit.
To-night, at twelve o'clock, we are to go to the house of a Hindu,
called Karaver, in Berners Street, where we shall be initiated into
the second stage of our compact."

"I hope t