“No, I’ll stay till I’ve looked at all of them. I hope you won’t think I’m a coward. When I said I was afraid I meant that I felt a sort of awe. I should think most persons would experience some such feeling on beholding all these strange figures for the first time. No doubt, if I lived in Tibet, or wherever these images come from, I should regard them only with reverence, and believe in them as sacred guardians, like the others who have been familiar with them from childhood.”

Nick Carter slipped behind a tall vase on a stand close to where he had been standing. He saw that Ched Ramar was about to go downstairs, and he did not want to be seen.

“I’ll stay up here till she has finished her examination,” he thought. “Then, if she should get frightened—as she may when she is alone—I’ll step forward and try to give her courage. She knows me only as Doctor Hodgson, and I flatter myself I took the part of a grave and reverend medico pretty nearly to perfection.”

Ched Ramar, with a low bow, turned away from the girl, strode to the red velvet curtains, and pulled open the railed door. That was the last Nick saw of him, for the curtains fell together before he had stepped into the elevator.

Clarice, her two delicate, white-gloved hands interlocked behind her, stood gazing thoughtfully at the gigantic Buddha.

CHAPTER III.
WHAT THE BUDDHA SAID.

The Buddha was a work that would have attracted special attention in any collection. If it had been in a public museum, there is no doubt there would have been a crowd in front of it most of the time.

It was on a dais of its own, a giant statue of a squatting Buddha, wrought in hammered brass, with an enormous sapphire in the middle of its great forehead. The sapphire alone must have been worth an immense sum, just as a jewel.[Pg 10]

The figure reached almost from floor to ceiling, so that the sapphire was very high. If one wished to look at the jewel at close range—and most persons who entered this room did want to do so—he had to climb a small stepladder which stood conveniently at one side. Nick saw the girl looking at this ladder, and he was about to make his presence known so that he could move it for her, when she carried it over herself to the front of the image and placed it firmly for use.

“No timidity about that girl,” thought the detective. “Ched Ramar needn’t get that idea into his head.”