“She is gone!” Florence exclaimed. “I have lost her!” Nevertheless, she went racing along the beach to enter the jungle over the path the girl had taken. She had taken up a strange trail. That trail was short. It ended abruptly. This she was soon enough to know.
CHAPTER V
THE SECRET PLACE
Petite Jeanne was a person of courage. Times there had been when, as a child living with the gypsies of France, she had believed that she saw a ghost. At the heart of black woods, beneath a hedge on a moonless night some white thing lying just before her had moved in the most blood-chilling fashion. Never, on such an occasion, had Jeanne turned to flee. Always, with knees trembling, heart in her throat, she had marched straight up to the “ghost.” Always, to be sure, the “ghost” had vanished, but Jeanne had gained courage by such adventures. So now, as she glided down the soft-carpeted, circular staircase with the heavy odor of incense rising before her and the play of eerie green lights all about her, she took a strong grip on herself, bade her fluttering heart be still, and steadily descended into the mysterious unknown.
The scene that met her gaze as at last she reached those lower levels, was fantastic in the extreme. A throng of little brown people, dressed in richest silks, their faces shining strangely in the green light, sat in small circles on rich Oriental rugs.
Scattered about here and there all over the room were low pedestals and on these pedestals rested incense burners. Fantastic indeed were the forms of these burners: ancient dragons done in copper, eagles of brass with wings spread wide, twining serpents with eyes of green jade, and faces, faces of ugly men done in copper. These were everywhere.
As Jeanne sank silently to a place on the floor, she felt that some great event in the lives of these people was about to transpire. They did not speak; they whispered; and once, then again, and yet again, their eyes strayed expectantly to a low stage, built across the far end of the room.
“What is to happen?” the girl asked herself. She shuddered. To forget that she was in a secret place at the very heart of a Chinese temple built near the center of a great city—this was impossible.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she chided herself. “Something may happen to me. I may be detained. I may not be able to reach the Opera House in time. And then—”
She wondered what that would mean. She realized with a sort of shock that she was strangely indifferent to it all. Truth was, events had so shaped themselves that she was at that moment undecided where her own best good lay. She had ventured something, had begun playing the role of a boy. She had done this that she might gain a remote end. The end now seemed very remote indeed. The perils involved in reaching that end had increased four-fold.
“Why go back at all?” she asked herself. “As Pierre I can die very comfortably. As Petite Jeanne I can live on. And no one will ever know. I am—”