The crystal chandelier in the long drawing-room had shed light for the Broods since the beginning of the nineteenth century; the great old sideboard was still covered with the massive plate of a hundred years ago; the tables, the chairs, the high-boys, the chests of drawers, and the huge four-posters were like satin to the eye and touch; the rugs, while older perhaps than the city itself, alone were new to the house of Brood. They had been installed by the present master of the house. Age, distinction, quality attended one the instant he set foot inside the sober portals. This was not the home of men who had been merely rich; it was not wealth alone that stood behind these stately investments. At the top of the house were the rooms which no one entered except by the gracious will of the master. Here James Brood had stored the quaint, priceless treasures of his own peculiar fancy: exquisite, curious things from the mystic East, things that are not to be bought and sold, but come only to the hand of him who searches in lands where peril is the price. Worlds separated the upper and lower regions of that fine old house; a single step took one from the sedate Occident into the very heart of the Orient; a narrow threshold was the line between the rugged West and the soft, languorous, seductive East. In this part of the house James Brood, when at home for one of his brief stays, spent many of his hours in seclusion, shut off from the rest of the establishment as completely as if he were the inhabitant of another world. Attended by his Hindu servant, a silent man named Ranjab, and on occasions by his secretary, he saw but little of the remaining members of his rather extensive household. For several years he had been engaged in the task of writing his memoirs--so-called--in so far as they related to his experiences and researches of the past twenty years. It was not his intention to give this long and elaborate account of himself to the world at large, but to publish privately a very limited edition without regard for expense, copies of which were to find their way into exclusive collections and libraries given over to science and travel. This work progressed slowly because of his frequent and protracted absences. When at home, he laboured ardently and with a purpose that more than offset the periods of indifference. His secretary and amanuensis was Lydia Desmond, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his one-time companion and friend, the late John Desmond, whose death occurred when the girl was barely ten years of age. Brood, on hearing of his old comrade's decease, immediately made inquiries concerning the condition in which he had left his wife and child, with the result that Mrs Desmond was installed as housekeeper in the New York house and the daughter given every advantage in the way of an education.