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. 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.” Unlike most statues of Buddha, the eyes of this one were not closed. They were merely skillfully made openings, which, in the gloom of the room, might easily be imagined to have cruel, shifty eyes in their depths. “I must go up and look at that sapphire,” the girl said aloud. “I never saw such a magnificent jewel in my life before. I have heard that they have precious stones in India that are never equaled anywhere else, and I can believe that now. What a heavenly blue! Yet I wish those eyes weren’t there. Pshaw! They are only holes! I believe I am a coward, after all.” This thought seemed to put courage into her, for she had her foot on the bottom step of the ladder even as she spoke. She did not go up at once, however. Standing at the bottom of the ladder, with one foot on the step, she looked up at the face of the idol in a reverie that was half fascination and half repulsion. “I’ve got to go up and look at that sapphire!” she breathed at last. “Besides, I want to look at its face close. I feel as if I must.” With her hands out to steady herself, so that they touched the knees of the great figure, she went slowly upward, hesitating at each step. She could not have told why she went up so slowly and uncertainly. It seemed as if there were a power greater than her own controlling her movements. It seemed to Nick as if the blue light of the sapphire changed to a horrible green as the girl drew her face level with the great brass visage of the statue. “Pshaw!” he murmured. “It was only the shadow of her head. But in such a place as this one might imagine anything.” Up a little higher she went, and, as one hand hung rigidly at her side, the other rested on the shoulder of the god. It was an incongruous picture they made--the beautiful young American girl seemingly exchanging confidences with this grotesque representation of a deity coming down through countless ages. Suddenly a hollow voice seemed to fill the room. It came from the sneering, parted lips of the image. There could be no doubt of that. The detective involuntarily tried to get a little nearer, to catch what the words were.