"If you will follow me--" she said calmly, and led the way up the stairs, her soft black robe caressing her slender ankles.
A lamp set in a bracket burned dimly upon the second floor, and he followed her heavily down the high, echoing corridor. A large hall, scantily furnished, dim and mysterious with many doors to right and left, a house, it seemed, more like a hotel than a villa, and more like a monastery than either. The girl led the way and opened at last a door near the end of the corridor, entering the room and setting the candle upon a table. In the flickering light which cast its shadows upward along her face she seemed to have taken again the character of the Priestess, the Shade of the garden, with the cowl and robe of mystery. Her expression too seemed to have grown more serious, though the golden nimbus of light was again entwined about her ruddy hair.
"Good night, Monsieur Rowlan'," she said gently. "Tomorrow morning you will find a change of clothing upon the chair outside the door. Sleep safely. If you fear--" she paused.
"Fear?" he asked. "Of what?"
"I forgot that you are a soldier. But when I go out, nevertheless, you shall bolt this door upon the inside." And as he turned to her in inquiry, "No. You must ask no questions, but only obey."
His smile met with no response. And so he shrugged and bowed.
"It shall be as you desire, Mademoiselle."
And without a word, she was gone.
He listened for a moment to the light tap of her footfalls down the corridor until he heard them no more, when he closed the heavy door, bolted it and sank upon the small iron bed while he tried to ponder a solution of the events of the evening.
Out of the train of vague occurrences stood clearly the wholesome friendly figure of this girl, Tanya Korasov. Her robes, her cowl, the vestments of her strange association with the fanatic Kirylo Ivanitch, seemed only to bring her sanity, youth and kindliness into stronger relief. That she was a member of some secret association of which her compatriot was the head seemed more or less obvious, but what was the personal relationship between them? The man had intellectual power and doubtless held his sway as the official director of some sort of propaganda for the freedom of Russia, but his deference to the wishes of the girl made it also evident that she too was high in his councils. His niece? His cousin? Or was their relation something nearer, something----? Impossible. The man was fifty, the girl young enough to be his daughter. A relationship purely intellectual, more deeply welded by the bonds of a cognate purpose. But what of the robes, the vigils, the daïs in the garden, the strange dialogue about the escaping slave which seemed to have so large a part in determining his own status as a guest in this house of mystery? What was IT? And what the danger suggested by the final injunction of the girl to bolt the door of his bedroom? From whom? Ivanitch? From the shock-headed youth in the kitchen who had stared at him so curiously? Or from others whom he had not seen?