The club slipped from the hairy fingers.  The tense frame, which had been already crouched for the spring, was suddenly relaxed.  The knees trembled.

“Back to that corner,” Quest ordered, pointing.

Slowly and dejectedly, the ape-man crept to where he had been ordered and sat there with dull, non-comprehending stare.  It was a new force, this, a note of which he had felt—­the superman raising the voice of authority.  Quest touched his forehead and found it damp.  The strain of those few seconds had been intolerable.

“I don’t think these other animals will hurt,” he said.  “Let’s have a look around the place.”

The search took only a few moments.  The monkeys ran and jumped around them, gibbering as though with pleasure.  The leopard watched them always with a snarl and an evil light in his eye.  They found nothing unusual until they came to the distant corner, where a huge piano box lay on its side with the opening turned to the wall.

“This is where the brute sleeps, I suppose,” Quest remarked.  “We’ll turn it round, any way.”

They dragged it a few feet away from the wall, so that the opening faced them.  Then Lenora gave a little cry and Quest stood suddenly still.

“The skeleton!” Lenora shrieked.  “It’s the skeleton!”

Quest stooped down and drew away the matting which concealed some portion of this strange-looking object.  It was a skeleton so old that the bones had turned to a dull grey.  Yet so far as regards its limbs, it was almost complete.  Quest glanced towards the hands.

“Little fingers both missing,” he muttered.  “That’s the skeleton all right, Lenora.”

“Remember the message!” she exclaimed. “’Where the skeleton is, the necklace may be also.’”

Quest nodded shortly.

“We’ll search.”

They turned over everything in the place fruitlessly.  There was no sign of the necklace.  At last they gave it up.

“You get outside, Lenora,” Quest directed.  “I’ll just bring this beast round again and then we’ll tackle the Professor.”

Lenora stepped back into the fresh air with a little murmur of relief.  Quest turned towards the creature which crouched still huddled up in its corner, its eyes half-closed, rolling a little from side to side.

“Look at me,” he ordered.

The creature obeyed.  Once more its frame seemed to grow more virile and natural.

“You need sleep no longer,” Quest said.  “Wake up and be yourself.”

The effect of his words was instantaneous.  Almost as he spoke, the creature crouched for a spring.  There was wild hatred in its close-set eyes, the snarl of something fiend-like in its contorted mouth.  Quest slipped quickly through the door.

“Any one may have that for a pet!” he remarked grimly.  “Come, Lenora, there’s a word or two to be said to the Professor.  There’s something here will need a little explanation.”