"For how long?" she asked, with a strange smile.

He covertly consulted his shirt cuff. "For tree tousand fife
hundred and sixty-two years," he said rapidly.

She looked at him disdainfully. "The doctor has been putting you
up to that! It won't wash! I don't refer to your shirt cuff," she
added with deep satire.

"Adorable one!" he broke out passionately, attempting to embrace
her, "I have come to take you." Without moving, she touched a knob
in the wall. A trap-door beyond him sank, and out of the bowels of
the earth leaped three indescribable demons. Then, rising, she
took a cake of chalk from the table and, drawing a mystic half
circle on the floor, returned to the divan, lit a cigarette, and
leaning comfortably back, said in a low, monotonous voice, "Advance
one foot within that magic line, and on that head, although it wore
a crown, I launch the curse of Rome."

"I--only wanted to take you--with a kodak," he said, with a light
laugh to conceal his confusion, as he produced the instrument from
his coat-tail pocket.

"Not with that cheap box," she said, rising with magnificent
disdain. "Come again with a decent instrument--and perhaps"--
Then, lightly humming in a pure contralto, "I've been photographed
like this--I've been photographed like that," she summoned the
slave to conduct him back, and vanished through a canvas screen,
which nevertheless seemed to the dazed Chevalier to be the stony
front of the pyramids.