"I'm sure I never meant to enlarge it," Pamela retorted charmingly. "I knew some poor thing sought shelter and you swallowed it. John, why in the world didn't you bring me something beautiful from the Philippines? I detest such honesty. He came home without spoiling the Egyptians."
"But he made himself famous," interposed Mrs. Prynne.
John reddened under Dr. Macclesfield's amused eyes.
"The truth is that neither spoils nor fame were so easily come by," he objected. "I can only regret my lost opportunities. You should get Astry to go there; he'd be happy in the pawn-shops, Mrs. Astry."
"Oh, Johnstone doesn't care for beautiful things," said Eva scornfully. "He wants 'a lizard's leg and owlet's wing;' he's always brewing cauldrons like the witches. He's just imported some new horror from the West Indies, not a sorcerer's crystal but something more potent. Beware of his den, my friends."
"How do you escape these terrors?" asked Pamela. "It would be so easy for him to cast his spell over you."
"He did once." Eva colored suddenly. "Now I simply avoid the peril and he's likely to practise it on you. Come, girls, let us escape the danger," she added, laughing, as she rose from the table.
But in the drawing-room Eva was scarcely as gay; she let Pamela fill in the gaps while she sat listening to Mrs. Prynne, but her eyes wandered restlessly to the door. It grew later and later, yet the men still lingered over their wine and their cigars, or else they had gone to the den. Had her idle jesting led them there? She stirred uneasily; she had an inexplicable horror of Astry's den; it brought back to her the terrors of that night when she had told the falsehood against Rachel to save herself.
As Eva feared, it was to his den that Astry had taken the men. It was a long, low-ceiled room in the extreme end of the house, separated by a wing from the conservatory and entirely beyond sight and sound of the drawing-rooms and hall. The ceiling was of carved oak and the walls were covered with tapestries, curious pictures, old firearms, and bits of carvings and engravings. The polished floor was bare and in the center of the room was a large table of sculptured marble, a curious dragon forming the central body and legs. There was nothing on it now but a graceful wand of carved ivory forked at the end to support a red ball, a perfect sphere in shape and the size of an enormous orange.
Hideous things grinned in the dusky corners, polished death's heads, toads with jeweled eyes, coiled serpents, grinning Chinese gods, and the fortune-teller's crystal sparkled on a cushion beside the alembics and the crucibles of the alchemist. Astry had collected every odd and end that he had found in a life given much to travel and the luxury of dilettanteism. The rage of the collector had run riot here with the purse of the millionaire to back it.