nderful dark hair was arranged in a great heap which
sloped backward from her head. Her face was chalk white, from a bath
in rice powder; her fine lips were curled in the most sinister of
smiles; and her eyes glowed with a splendid abandon. She looked
wicked; she radiated cruelty.

And the twins gasped in sweet horror. It is probable that twin
trickles of icy excitement chased up and down their twin spines.
Anthony gaped, and his gray eyes expressed an unbounded infatuation.

With a gracious stealth she moved beyond them, not once lowering her
magnificent eyes, and shot a huge brass bolt in the door.

They formed an expectant, a worshipful semicircle. In a low voice
Peter made the introductions, dwelling at fastidious length upon the
tremendous villainy of this slender sorceress, who swept him all the
time with a proud and disdainful fire. She nodded stiffly at intervals.

"The Princess Meng Da Tlang has a word to say to you." He bowed
profoundly.

"It is only this," said Romola Borria in tones as rich as the Kyoto
temple gong, "what you have thus far seen, and what you are about to
gaze upon, must always--forever--remain a secret within your hearts.
Follow me." Romola, or the Princess Meng Da Tlang, floated down the
dim corridor with a further silken rustle of skirts, and drew back the
curtain at the far end.

The quartette filed into a large and lofty room, flickering under the
pallid flames of candles. The wax dripping from some of these hung
like icicles or stalactites from the shallow bronze cups, and they
illuminated a scene that was bizarre.

The walls were burdened with heavy rugs which responded with a waxen
sheen to the mystic light of the candles, and they were of the sombre
hues of the China that passed its zenith many centuries ago. They
served to give this place a solemn air of vast dignity and richness.

Along the inner wall, placed so that it squarely commanded the doorway,
grinned a huge green image of Buddha, surrounded by a clutter of brass
candlesticks and mounted on a splendid throne of brass filigree
underneath which red flames were burning.

The odor of costly incense was heavy and sweet, the smoke from a
brazier arising in a thin, motionless blue spar which, when it had
climbed up through the air for a distance of about four feet, broke
into a sort of turquoise fan and this drifted on up to the ceiling in
heavy wisps. The incense pot was very old, of black lacquer and brass,