now--always
one in the room, night and day."

"What for?"

"Why, the parents are afraid she'll be kidnapped, and held for a big
ransom. No, I never saw her, but I've got the thing down to a dot.
Wouldn't I like to interview her, though, get her story, how the world
looks to her. Under surveillance for sixteen years! The 'Prisoner of
Chillon' is nothing to it for romance."

"Just the facts are enough, I should say."

"Yes, facts make a good basis, sometimes. I've got 'em all in, but of
course I've worked the thing up for all it is worth. You'll see.
I kept it one day to try and get a photograph. We've got the house and
Mavick, but the girl's can't be found, and it isn't safe to wait. We are
going to blow it out tomorrow morning."

VI

The Mavick mansion was on Fifth Avenue in the neighborhood of Central
Park. It was one of the buildings in the city that strangers were always
taken to see. In fact, this was a palace not one kind of a palace, but
all kinds of a palace. The clever and ambitious architect of the house
had grouped all the styles of architecture he had ever seen, or of which
he had seen pictures. Here was not an architectural conception, like a
sonnet or a well-constructed novel, but if all the work could have been
spread out in line, in all its variety, there would have been produced a
panorama. The sight of the mansion always caused wonder and generally
ignorant admiration. Its vastness and splendor were felt to be somehow
typical of the New World and of the cosmopolitan city.

The cost, in the eyes of the spectators, was a great part of its merits.
No doubt this was a fabulous sum. "You can form a little idea of it,"
said a gentleman to his country friend, "when I tell you that that little
bit there, that little corner of carving and decoration, cost two hundred
thousand dollars! I had this from the architect himself."

"My!"

The interior was as fully representative of wealth and of the ambition to
put under one roof all the notable effects of all the palaces in the
world. But it had, what most palaces have not, all the requisites for
luxurious living. The variety of styles in the rooms was bewildering.
Artists of distinction, both foreign and native, had vied with each other
in the decoration of the rooms given over to the display of their genius.
All paganism and all Christianity, history, myth, and the beauties of
nature were spread upon the walls and ceilings. Rare woods, rare
marble