“Stay, _señor_.” He raised his hand, pointing a finger at me. “You who are of the art a judge—you would see this painting, no? This picture by the great Vasquez that soon will be seen by all the world?” He laughed again—an eery laugh that chilled my blood. “One moment, _señor_—one little moment, and your eyes shall see that which they have never seen before.” He rose to his feet unsteadily. “Life upon canvas, _señor_. And beauty—vivid and real to make your pulses beat strong.” I stood beside him under the lantern. “We shall look upon it together, you and I.” He raised a hand apologetically. “That is, of course—if the _señor_ desires.” The mystery his words implied appealed to me—I was in my twenties then—and to the spirit of adventure that has always been strong in me. It was chicanery, I knew, but interesting, and I would see it through. “Very well,” I said. “I will look at your painting.” In silence I followed him into the shadows of the back of the room. “Careful, _señor_—a chair is here.” He suddenly drew aside a curtain in the darkness, and we stepped into a dim hallway, with a narrow flight of stairs leading to the floor above. “I shall go in front, _señor_. You will follow. The way is not long, and there is light.” The stairs were narrow and uncarpeted; they creaked a little under our tread. On the landing a window stood partly open, its shade flapping in the wind. The snow on the ledge outside had drifted in over the sill. We stopped on the landing, and the old man closed the window softly. “We speak not so loud now, _señor_, so—” He broke off abruptly. “It is better we speak not so loud now,” he finished. At the top of the stairs we turned back and passed through a doorway into a room that evidently was immediately over the one we had just left. It was a room perhaps thirty feet in length and half as broad. My first impression as I stepped over the threshold was that I had stepped across the world—in one brief instant transported from the bare, ramshackle, tumbledown Bohemianism of Greenwich Village, into the semibarbaric, Levantine splendor of some Musselman ruler. The room was carpeted with Oriental rugs; its walls were hung with tapestries; its windows shrouded with portieres. Moorish weapons—only symbols now of the Mohammedan reign over Spain—decorated the walls. Two couches were piled high with vividly colored pillows. The rugs and all the hangings were somber in tone. The whole room bore an air of splendid, lavish luxury; and yet there was about it something oppressive—a brooding silence, perhaps, or the heavy scent of incense. “My room of work, _señor_,” said the little old man softly, closing the door behind us. I noticed then that there was one other door to the room, in the side wall near the front where there were two very large windows almost like a side skylight; and that this other door stood slightly ajar.