“But you read it out of the note that Soma dropped,” cried the scientist.  “Don’t you remember where he threatened to put the five babies?”

“The Black Kindergarten!” I stammered.

“The Black Kindergarten,” said the old man.  “That is what the inhuman brute called the place when he lowered us into it.  We are to stay here till I sign papers that will give him possession of my property, and till—­till Edith consents to marry him!”

He flung the words out into the stillness, and for a few minutes no one spoke.  The horror of the situation had the same effect upon me as a blow from a sandbag.  Three days before, we were in possession of Leith’s letter to the one-eyed man, in which he had remarked that we would be occupants of the place of eternal night, and yet we had not been able to avert the fate which the brute had in store for us in case the Professor and Edith Herndon refused to consider his villainous proposals.  The Professor’s money and the girl’s hand!  The words made me physically sick, and I sat down upon the floor of the place till the dizziness had passed from my brain.

“And food?” Holman put the question, but the words seemed to come to me from a great distance.

“He told us he would lower it to us once a day till we—­till we came to our senses,” said Edith Herndon quietly.  “We received our first supply some hours ago.”

She tried to speak bravely, but the little catch in her voice belied the courageous front which she endeavoured to assume under cover of the darkness.  Barbara was silent, except for an occasional sob which she was unable to stifle, while the Professor poured forth his story of Leith’s deception when he first met him in Sydney, and where the big scoundrel had poured into the ears of the laurel-hungry scientist the tales of skulls and ruins which he would find upon the Isle of Tears.  The skulls and ruins were there, but it looked as if we would add our own skeletons to the crumbling bones of the long-dead Polynesians, the peculiarities of whose whitened brain cases were to supply the subject matter of the learned treatise that was to bring fame to the archaeologist.  It was an indescribably mournful reunion.  We could not see each other, and when silence fell upon us I had a horrible sensation that the choking, depressing darkness of the place was wafting Edith Herndon away from me.  I longed to find and clasp the hand that had taken mine the night on board The Waif when I made an offer of my services.

The Professor had explained that the opening through which they had been lowered was immediately above their heads.  They had not moved from the spot lest they would not be able to find it again to obtain the food which Leith had promised to send till they saw fit to accede to his proposals, and when Holman suggested moving forward upon a tour of investigation the old man combated the idea vigorously.

“We will lose ourselves, and we will never be able to find our way back here to get the food,” he cried.