Of those joys for which thousands of her plainer sisters yearn and starve to the end of their days she had experienced a surfeit.  Always she sought for novelty, for new adventures.  She was confident of herself, but yet—­and here lay the delicious thrill—­not wholly confident.  Many times she had promised to visit the house of Lou Chada’s father—­a mystery palace cunningly painted, a perfumed page from the Arabian poets dropped amid the interesting squalor of Limehouse.

Perhaps she had never intended to go.  Who knows?  But on the night when she came within the ken of Chief Inspector Kerry, Lou Chada had urged her to do so in his poetically passionate fashion, and, wanting to go, she had asked herself:  “Am I strong enough?  Dare I?”

They had dined, danced, and she had smoked one of the scented cigarettes which he alone seemed to be able to procure, and which, on their arrival from the East, were contained in queer little polished wooden boxes.

Then had come an unfamiliar nausea and dizziness, an uncomfortable recognition of the fact that she was making a fool of herself, and finally a semi-darkness through which familiar faces loomed up and were quickly lost again.  There was the soft, musical voice of Lou Chada reassuring her, a sense of chill, of helplessness, and then for a while an interval which afterward she found herself unable to bridge.

Knowledge of verity came at last, and Lady Pat raised herself from the divan upon which she had been lying, and, her slender hands clutching the cushions, stared about her with eyes which ever grew wider.

She was in a long, rather lofty room, which was lighted by three silver lanterns swung from the ceiling.  The place, without containing much furniture, was a riot of garish, barbaric colour.  There were deep divans cushioned in amber and blood-red.  Upon the floor lay Persian carpets and skins of beasts.  Cunning niches there were, half concealing and half revealing long-necked Chinese jars; and odd little carven tables bore strangely fashioned vessels of silver.  There was a cabinet of ebony inlaid with jade, there were black tapestries figured with dragons of green and gold.  Curtains she saw of peacock-blue; and in a tall, narrow recess, dominating the room, squatted a great golden Buddha.

The atmosphere was laden with a strange perfume.

But, above all, this room was silent, most oppressively silent.

Lady Pat started to her feet.  The whole perfumed place seemed to be swimming around her.  Reclosing her eyes, she fought down her weakness.  The truth, the truth respecting Lou Chada and herself, had uprisen starkly before her.  By her own folly—­and she could find no tiny excuse—­she had placed herself in the power of a man whom, instinctively, deep within her soul, she had always known to be utterly unscrupulous.

How cleverly he had concealed the wild animal which dwelt beneath that suave, polished exterior!  Yet how ill he had concealed it!  For intuitively she had always recognized its presence, but had deliberately closed her eyes, finding a joy in the secret knowledge of danger.  Now at last he had discarded pretense.