ion, and polo-playing, motor-driving, clothes-mad men of an
insouciance appalling.

On the edge of unconsciousness she said aloud, but without knowing
that she spoke, three words.

These were: "Charmeuse . . . Paquin . . . Bride . . ."

And then she slept; her pallid face upturned to that high-arched sky
of brass, from which light and heat beat down in brutal waves, she
slept the sleep of exhaustion, deep and heavy; dark and stupefying
sleep possessed her utterly, as overpowering and obliterating as
though induced by drugs.

CHAPTER II

BURGLARY

She wakened in sharp panic, bewildered by the grotesquerie of some
half-remembered dream in contrast with the harshness of inclement
fact, drowsily realising that since she had fallen asleep it had come
on to rain smartly out of a shrouded sky.

Without the least warning a blinding violet glare cut the gloom, the
atmosphere quaked with a terrific shock of thunder, and the downpour
became heavier.

Appalled, the girl sprang from her chair and groped her way to the
scuttle through a crepuscle resembling late twilight.

It was closed.

Somebody, presumably the janitor, had shut it against the impending
storm without troubling to make sure there was no one on the roof, for
her chair had been invisible behind the shoulder of the top-light.

With a cry of dismay the girl knelt and, digging fingers beneath the
cover, tugged with all her might. But it was securely hooked
beneath and held fast.

Then, driven half frantic less by the lashing rain than by a dread of
lightning which she had never outgrown, she stumbled back to the glass
face of the top-light and pounded it with her fists, screaming to Mary
Warden to come and let her in. But no lights showed in the studio, and
no one answered; reluctantly she was persuaded that Mary was not yet
home from rehearsals.

The long rolling, grinding broadsides of thunder made almost
continuous accompaniment--broken only by the briefest
intermissions--to the fiery sword-play that slashed incessantly
through and through that grim tilt of swollen black cloud.

Half-stunned and wholly terrified, dazzled and deafened as well, the
girl dashed the rain from her eyes and strove to recollect her wits
and grapple sanely with her plight.

Already she was wet to her skin--water could no more harm her--but the
mad elemental tumult confounded all her senses; her sole conscious
impulse was to gain shelter of some sort from the sound