en,--I wish you well; your family have always been
good patients of mine. Marry some good Scotch girl; I know one with
fifty thousand pounds. Let the Princess go!"

"To him--never! I will marry her! Yet," he murmured softly to
himself, "feefty thousand pun' is nae small sum. Aye! Not that I care
for siller--but feefty thousand pun'! Eh, sirs!"

VI

Dr. Haustus knew that the Chevalier had again visited the Princess,
although he had kept the visit a secret,--and indeed was himself
invisible for a day or two afterwards. At last the doctor's curiosity
induced him to visit the Chevalier's apartment. Entering, he was
surprised--even in that Land of Mystery--to find the room profoundly
dark, smelling of Eastern drugs, and the Chevalier sitting before a
large plate of glass which he was examining by the aid of a lurid ruby
lamp,--the only light in the weird gloom. His face was pale and
distraught, his locks were disheveled.

"Voila!" he said. "Mon Dieu! It is my third attempt. Always the
same--hideous, monstrous, unearthly! It is she, and yet it is not she!"

The doctor, professional man as he was and inured to such spectacles,
was startled! The plate before him showed the Princess's face in all
its beautiful contour, but only dimly veiling a ghastly death's-head
below. There was the whole bony structure of the head and the eyeless
sockets; even the graceful, swan-like neck showed the articulated
vertebral column that supported it in all its hideous reality. The
beautiful shoulders were there, dimly as in a dream--but beneath was
the empty clavicle, the knotty joint, the hollow sternum, and the ribs
of a skeleton half length!

The doctor's voice broke the silence. "My friend," he said dryly, "you
see only the truth! You see what she really is, this peerless Princess
of yours. You see her as she is to-day, and you see her kinship to the
bones that have lain for centuries in yonder pyramid. Yet they were
once as fair as this, and this was as fair as they--in effect the same!
You that have madly, impiously adored her superficial beauty, the mere
dust of tomorrow, let this be a warning to you! You that have no soul
to speak of, let that suffice you! Take her and be happy. Adieu!"

Yet, as he passed out of the fitting tomblike gloom of the apartment
and descended the stairs, he murmured to himself: "Odd that I should
have lent him my camera with the Rontgen-ray attachment still on. No
matter! It is