“This is the word of the master:  Take to the fair-haired lady the broken coin, my sign, and she will remember her word to me.  Verily, for the sign’s sake, she will follow without fear.”

“The master is not ill, then?”

“In his body he is well.  But of the spirit of man, and what help he needs, there is but one judge, namely, God.”

“He has need of me?”

“He sends the token by me, Achmet.”  And he stood there with a motionless patience, waiting.

Achmet!  I remembered an afternoon in the Enchanted Wood, and that name ringing in my ears—­Achmet!

“I will follow you,” I said.  And instantly The Jinnee pushed open the unlocked door of the spring-house and stepped inside.

I hesitated for a moment, turning my head toward Hynds House, blazing with lights.  I could hear voices, laughter, snatches of song.  From the kitchen Mary Magdalen’s great, rich, unctuous laugh rolled out like an organ peal.  Silhouetted against the lighted library window was one of our big black cats, with an arched back and an uplifted and expressive tail.

“I wait,” said a quiet voice.  And, clutching Boris by the collar, I stepped inside the door.

It was dark in there; only a faint and broken light came through the one window, set high in the wall.  Boris’s eyes were balls of fire, and his feet made a stealthy, scuffling sound on the flagged floor.  The little spring bubbling in its stone basin was like a whispering, secretive voice.

Achmet stooped down, over in one corner.  Then, shading a very modern flash-light with a fold of his robe, he showed me one of the square flags lifted, and a black hole yawning in the floor.

I backed away.  With a crooked, sly smile, The Jinnee snapped his fingers at Boris.  The big dog jerked himself free of my hand and disappeared.

“Now!” said The Jinnee.  And like one in a dream I gathered my lace-trimmed skirts in my hand and backed down a spider-web stairway that barely gave one foothold.  Achmet waited until I reached the bottom, then he, too, backed in, and I heard the flagstone fall to over my head.

There was a moment of utter and awful blackness and stillness.  I was upon the point of shrieking, when something cold and friendly touched my hand:  Boris was nosing me.  The Jinnee, at the bottom of the steps, showed the light.

We were in a circular shaft, narrowing upward like an inverted funnel.  It was quite clean and dry, lined with hard cement.  Branching from it were two wedge-shaped openings, just wide enough to allow one person at a time to walk through.

The Jinnee plunged into one of these, and Boris and I followed.  There was nothing else for us to do.

“This is safest way.  If I come through house, I am seen.  Not want that,” said Achmet, over his shoulder.