"Nothing seems to have been touched here," he muttered.
"Nothing has been touched," the Baroness assented calmly. "Other rooms, as you know, have been ransacked, the grounds have been dug up, and the tower almost pulled to pieces. But here, where you sat in state and pulled the legs out of the spiders' bodies and the souls out of your poor human victims, well, no one has thought of looking here."
The man chuckled, but there was a certain malevolent uneasiness in his expression as he stared at the speaker.
"My victims were not all unwilling, eh?" he demanded.
The Baroness had been feeling along the wall. She touched a switch, and a dull glow of light shone through a dust-encrusted globe set in the ceiling.
"There is still a connection," she said. "It is better so? You need have no fear. The shutters are tightly closed. No one will know that human beings have dared to penetrate into the spider's parlour."
I had my first comprehensive view of the room—a bare, official-looking apartment, with a huge writing table near the window, a heap of empty champagne bottles and cigar boxes in one corner. There was dust everywhere. It seemed, indeed, as though the room might not have been opened for many months.
"You need have no fear," the Baroness repeated. "The shutters are fast closed. You can look around on the scene of your former triumphs. The telephone wires have been cut. Nothing else has been altered."
They stood facing one another, the man and the woman. From my point of vantage in the background, I was conscious of a subtle change in the Baroness. The cold stolidity, almost woodenness of her deportment, had gone. Her lips were parted a little, and there was something menacing in the gleam of her white teeth. Her eyes held expression, expression which I could not analyse. She seemed to bristle with sensation. The man who faced her had become uneasy.
"We talk too much," he muttered. "It is enough for me that you have obeyed my orders and left all here untouched."