And when she had called on him for help, when the trembling appeal had sprung past her stricken pride, and he had seen the terror in her soft, child’s eyes, then the spark had struck its conflagration.  He had become nothing but a hot, headstrong fury of devotion.

And he said to himself now that he might have known it was going to happen, and that if he had not been so concerned that morning about saving his face and preserving this fiction of indifference he would know a little more about the labyrinth they were poking about in—­the little more that tips the scale between safety and destruction.

But he did not know and blind Chance was his only goddess.

The passage had brought him to a wall and a narrow stairs while another passage led off to the right, apparently to the forward regions of the place.

He took the stairs.  He had had enough of underground regions when they did not lead to water gates and the stairs promised novelty at least.

He wished he knew more about Turkish palaces.  He supposed they had a fairly consistent ground plan, but beyond a few main features of inner courts and halls he was culpably ignorant of their intentions.  If it were an early Egyptian tomb or temple now!  But then, perhaps the Turks were more indefinite in their building and rebuilding.

At the head of the stairs a door stood half ajar.  Through the crack he strained his eyes, but his anxious glance met only the darkness of utter night.  Not a gleam of light.  And not a sound—­except the far, hollow stamping of some stabled horse.

Softly he pushed the door open and he and Aimee slipped within.  The place, whatever it was, appeared deserted, a dark, bare, backstairs region—­for he stumbled over a bucket—­from which to the right he could just discern a hall leading into the forward part of the palace, wanly lighted some distance on, with the pale flicker of an old ceiling lamp.

They seemed to be at the end of the hall and the darker shadows in the walls about them appeared to be a number of doors—­closed, so his groping hands informed him.

Oh, for his excavator’s steady light, or a pocket flash!  Oh, for a light of any kind, even a temporary match!  But he dared not risk the scratch, for now he caught the thud of footfalls overhead, heavy footfalls, and there might be stairs unexpectedly close at hand.

He turned to Aimee but the girl shook her head helplessly and hesitant and dashed, for all their young confidence, they wavered a moment hand in hand in the dark, fearful of what a rash move might bring upon them.  And in the beating stillness Ryder became conscious that the muffled, monotonous stamping of a horse is a gloomy, disheartening thing in the night, and that footsteps overhead are of all noises the most nervous and unsettling.

What was behind those doors?  Not a spark of light came from them, that was one comfort.  The rooms, kitchen, service, store rooms or whatever they were, appeared in the same blackness and oblivion....  But any door might open on a roomful of sleeping gardeners and grooms....