It was a sitting-room.  The furniture was old-fashioned, but almost as handsome as any in Lady Maulevrier’s apartments.  There was a large sofa of most comfortable shape, covered with dark red velvet, and furnished with pillows and foot rugs, which would have satisfied a Sybarite of the first water.  Beside the sofa stood a hookah, with all appliances in the Oriental fashion; and half a dozen long cherry-wood pipes neatly arranged above the mantelpiece showed that Mr. Steadman’s uncle was a smoker of a luxurious type.

In the centre of the room stood a large writing table, with a case of pigeon-holes at the back, a table which would not have disgraced a Prime Minister’s study.  A pair of wax candles, in tall silver candlesticks, lighted this table, which was littered with papers, in a wild confusion that too plainly indicated the condition of the owner’s mind.  The oak floor was covered with Persian prayer rugs, old and faded, but of the richest quality.  The window curtains were dark red velvet; and through an open doorway Mary and her husband saw a corresponding luxury in the arrangements of the adjoining bedroom.

The whole thing seemed wild and strange as a fairy tale.  The weird and wizened old man, grinning and nodding his head at them.  The handsome room, rich with dark, subdued colour, in the dim light of four wax candles, two on the table, two on the mantelpiece.  The perfume of stephanotis and tea-roses, blended faintly with the all-pervading odour of latakia and Turkish attar.  All was alike strange, bearing in mind that this old man was a recipient of Lady Maulevrier’s charity, a hanger-on upon a confidential servant, who might be supposed to be generously treated if he had the run of his teeth and the shelter of a decent garret.  Verily, there was something regal in such hospitality as this, accorded to a pauper lunatic.

Where was Steadman, the alert, the watchful, all this time?  Mary wondered.  They had met no one.  The house was as mute as if it were under the spell of a magician.  It was like that awful chamber in the Arabian story, where the young man found the magic horse, and started on his fatal journey.  Mary felt as if here, too, there, must be peril; here, too, fate was working.

The old man went to the writing table, pushed aside the papers, and then stooped down and turned a mysterious handle or winch under the knee-hole, and the writing-desk moved slowly on one side, while the pigeon-holes sank, and a deep well full of secret drawers was laid open.

From one of these secret drawers the old man took a bunch of keys, nodding, chuckling, muttering to himself as he groped for them with tremulous hand.

’Steadman is uncommonly clever—­thinks he knows everything—­but he doesn’t know the trick of this table.  I could hide a regiment of Sepoys in this table, my dear.  Well, well, perhaps not Sepoys—­too big, too big—­but I could hide all the State papers of the Presidency.  There are drawers enough for that.’