were no naked Cupids.  He understood now that he had been quite wrong in his estimate of the room by which he had come into this Versailles.  Instead of being large it was tiny, and instead of being luxurious it was merely furnished with miscellaneous odds and ends left over from far more important furnishings.  It was indeed naught but a nondescript box of a hole insignificantly wedged between the state apartments and the outer lobby.

For an instant he forgot that he was in pursuit of Jock.  Jock was perfectly invisible and inaudible.  He must, however, have gone down the vista of the great chambers, and therefore Denry went down the vista of the great chambers after him, curiously expecting to have a glimpse of his long salmon-tinted coat or his cockaded hat popping up out of some corner.  He reached the other end of the vista, having traversed three enormous chambers, of which the middle one was the most enormous and the most gorgeous.  There were high windows everywhere to his right, and to his left, in every chamber, double doors with gilt handles of a peculiar shape.  Windows and doors, with equal splendour, were draped in hangings of brocade.  Through the windows he had glimpses of the gardens in their autumnal colours, but no glimpse of a gardener.  Then a carriage flew past the windows at the end of the suite, and he had a very clear though a transient view of two menials on the box-seat; one of those menials he knew must be Jock.  Hence Jock must have escaped from the state suite by one of the numerous doors.

Denry tried one door after another, and they were all fastened firmly on the outside.  The gilded handles would turn, but the lofty and ornate portals would not yield to pressure.  Mystified and startled, he went back to the place from which he had begun his explorations, and was even more seriously startled, and more deeply mystified to find nothing but a blank wall where he had entered.  Obviously he could not have penetrated through a solid wall.  A careful perusal of the wall showed him that there was indeed a door in it, but that the door was artfully disguised by painting and other devices so as to look like part of the wall.  He had never seen such a phenomenon before.  A very small glass knob was the door’s sole fitting.  Denry turned this crystal, but with no useful result.  In the brief space of time since his entrance, that door, and the door by which Jock had gone, had been secured by unseen hands.  Denry imagined sinister persons bolting all the multitudinous doors, and inimical eyes staring at him through many keyholes.  He imagined himself to be the victim of some fearful and incomprehensible conspiracy.