the
blackness behind the veil of Isis. There had been no time to choose; for
hardly was he safe under cover and peeping out from between the folds of
the veil than the door swung open slowly.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

VI

It was Mrs. Athelstone who came through the doorway. She was all in
white, a soft, silken white, which floated about her like a cloud,
drifting back from her bare arms and throat, and suggesting the rounded
outlines of her limbs. Her black hair, braided, hung below her waist,
and from her forehead the golden asp bound back the curls. Her arms were
full of roses--yellow, white and red.

For an uncertain moment she stood just within the hall, bathed in the
light that shone through from her apartments. Then she closed the door
and walked toward the veil. As she came through the shafts of light from
the windows, her gown was stained with crimson spots. She was at the
altar now, and Simpkins could no longer see her without changing his
position. Stealthily he edged along, careless of the statue just behind
him. As he parted the folds of the veil he saw that the altar was heaped
with flowers. Just beyond, the light playing fantastically on her
upturned face, stood Mrs. Athelstone.

Simpkins closed the veil abruptly. There came to him the remembrance
of the time when the boy had pulled the cat's tail, her anger and her
curious exclamation; and again, the repetition of it in his case, when
he had handled the mummy of Amosis roughly; and her affectation of
Egyptian symbols as ornaments. "She's the simon-pure Blavatsky, all
right," he concluded, as he pieced these things into what he had just
seen. "All others are base imitations."

The reporter had gathered from his little reading that behind these
monstrous gods and this complex symbolism there was something near akin
to Christianity in a few great essentials, and he understood how a woman
of Mrs. Athelstone's temperament, engrossed in the study of these things
and living in these surroundings, might be affected by them. Even he,
shrewd, hard Yankee that he was, had felt the influence of the place,
and there was that behind him then which made his heart beat quicker at
the thought.

When he looked out again Mrs. Athelstone was gone. He was impatient to
get to his work in the storeroom; but first he peeped out again to make
sure that she had returned to her room. She was still in the hall,
walking about in the corner where she or