He had been able to comment sagaciously upon the extraordinary narrative, and had appropriated as much of the sapphire as his greedy glance and covetous memory could bear away; but now that he pursued his way along the dimly lighted hallway which led to his apartment, a singularly thoughtful mood oppressed him.

This phenomenon, due, in part, to the cessation of the drowsy cadences of the Sepoy and the absence of the fascination and gleam of the sapphire, was relegated by Raikes to the overtures of approaching drowsiness.

And yet the startling episode which confronted Prince Otondo in the evening's instalment of this Oriental complication recurred to his mind again and again.

Strangely, too, Raikes did not comment upon the singular fact of the narrative itself.

Why should the Sepoy take the trouble to relate it to him, and why should he, of all unconcerned and self-centered men, manifest such an unusual interest in a recital which lacked every practical feature and had nothing but the weird to commend it?

If he asked himself these questions, it was with the impersonality of lethargy, for they were dismissed as readily as they presented themselves.

With such sedative queries, which were gradually diminishing from fabric to ravel, Raikes finally reached his room and, securely bolting the door, began to prepare to retire.

This was not an elaborate proceeding.

His outer garments removed, he had only to seek the seclusion of the bedclothes, clad in the remainder of his attire.

In this manner he economized on the cost of a night-robe and the time it would consume to don and doff such a superfluity.

At all events, if such was not his sordid reasoning, the promptness with which he fell asleep indicated that he did not propose to squander useless time in wakeful speculation upon the intangible nothings to which his recollection of the narrative began to fade.

However, if Raikes had succeeded in passing the boundaries of slumber, he had admitted, at the same time, extravagances of which he would never have been guilty in his wakeful hours, for he found himself so engaged in all sorts of uneasy shiftlessness and inconsiderate expenditure that when morning came and he awoke, as usual, with the sunrise, he resumed his customary identity, peevish and unrefreshed.

For a moment he sat with his knees huddled to his chin, over which his eyes peered like vermin in the wainscoting, and then, urged by an impulse whose source he could not determine, he leaped with surprising agility to the floor and proceeded to the false radiator.

For a short space of inexplicable indecision he stood with his hands resting upon the button which released the fastenings in the rear, an uneasy thoughtfulness converging the ugly wrinkles downward to the root of his nose and contracting his eyebrows with senile apprehension.

Suddenly his wonted decision asserted itself. He pressed the button and the radiator swung toward him; a few moments later the inner compartments responded to his manipulation, and the last door opened.

Apparently everything was as he had left it.

To his rapid enumeration the quantity of the small bags, containing his beloved coin, remained undisturbed. But, upon nearer regard, one of them--that within easiest reach--seemed to betray, through its canvas sides, a variety of unusually sharp angles and definite lines.

With a suffocating sensation of impending disaster, Raikes grasped the bag.

It pended from his tense grip with a frightful lightness. He caught up its neighbor for further confirmation. It responded with reassuring bulk and weight. But this one from which all specific gravity seemed to have departed--what did it contain?

With trembling hands the terrified man unfastened the cord which bound it and inverted the bag over the table.

Instead of the sharp, musical collision and clink of metal, a sodden succession of thuds smote his ears.

With a shriek of utter wonderment and alarm, Raikes stood erect and petrified.

His hands fell, with inert palsies, to his sides. His eyes seemed about to start from his head, for, looming dully to his aching gaze, in place of the coin he had so confidently hidden away, was a rayless, squalid heap of small, black coals.

A moment he stood lean and limp; every particle of the fever which consumed him concentrated in his starting eyes, which turned, with savage inquiry, toward the fastenings of the door.

The next instant, with a leap like that of a wild beast, he reached the threshold, examined the bolt with vivid glance and searching fingers, then raised his hand to his forehead with a gesture of utter distraction.

Nothing had been disturbed.

Even the check-pin which he had inserted over the bar for additional security was in place.

The only other possible means of entrance was by a window at the other extreme of the room.

But this was not to be considered, for it opened, with sheer precipitation, upon the unrelieved front of the house.

The windows adjacent were removed at a distance which could afford no possible basis from which to reach the one from which Raikes glared so grimly.

Moreover, the shutters had been clasped and the inner sash secured.

The conclusion was inevitable.

No one had entered the room during the night. It was impossible for a stranger to have access to the apartment during the day unobserved, and the recess behind the radiator was known to himself alone.

Nevertheless there was the absurd substitution.

It was incredible!

The secret repository was of his own construction.

The room was secure against intrusion.

And opposed to all this the incontrovertible proof of his loss, a catastrophe all the more agonizing since the logic of the situation obliged him to eliminate any one from suspicion.

Raikes had always considered a loss of this character the climax of malignant fate. He had never been able to contemplate it without the mortal shudder which usually communicates its chill to a loving parent confronted with the prospect of the departure of a dear one.

The recess in the wall contained all that Raikes held dear in the world; every spasm of fear, each contraction of the heart, always began and concluded with the button which moved its protecting bolts.

But now a new element added its ugly emphasis; there was something supernatural about the episode.

Convinced of the impossibility of thievery in any of its ordinary forms, he was bewildered as to the inexplicable means of his present predicament.

His sense of security was shaken.

He promised himself to stand guard over his belongings jealously that day, and to make assurance doubly sure at night.

In the meantime Raikes decided to confide his misfortune to no one.

There was a meager possibility that the guilty one might be misled by his silence; he had heard of such cases; he had known of the culprit offering condolences to the silent victim on the assumption that the latter had discussed his mishap with others.

He would wait, and with Raikes to determine was to do.

With his obnoxious individuality rendered several degrees more unendurable by his catastrophe, if that was possible, Raikes, having assumed that portion of his attire in which he had not slept, double-locked the door of his room from the outside with a brace of keys that, in all likelihood, had not their duplicates in existence, and proceeded to the dining-room, whither he had been preceded by his parchment of a sister.

At once he began to rustle his exhausted sensibilities with an added menace, awakened by a manifest desire on the part of the famished woman to satisfy the cravings of an ungratified hunger with an extra help of bread and butter.

As he looked upon the attenuated creature, with a morose reflection of his loss, the latter, with a rebellion which she could not control, selected with trembling fortitude a thick slice of bread, which she buttered liberally and began to devour with pathetic haste, despite the rebuking gleam of the rat eyes opposite, an episode which, added to his already perturbed mind, exasperated his brutal temper to the point of snarling remonstrance, which was fortunately denied its utterance by the opportune arrival of the Sepoy, who smiled blandly upon the chill acknowledgment of the shriveled Raikes.