He paused a moment after that time-honored raillery in which each reviled the other's talents, then continued, "But seriously, I have been pursuing some exceedingly roundabout speculations, and before I inflicted them on you, I wanted to study them out myself." "Oh, all right, then," agreed Farrell as he found a clean _demi-tasse_ and poured some of the lukewarm, sirupy Turkish coffee with which d'Artois drugged himself during his midnight studies. "But I see no connection with the _Memoirs of Haken_ and Antoinette's terrible predicament." "Listen then, I will enlighten you!" began d'Artois. "Mademoiselle Antoinette has been dreaming of a garden rich with roses, and lilies, and jasmine. It is alive with strangely colored birds. In fact, she described the very garden"--d'Artois indicated the page of Arabic script before him--"that Haken has so glowingly described: lovely girls playing the _sitar_ and the _oudh_, and entertaining the guests of paradise with song and wine. And a veiled master who ruled the garden." "But what," demanded Farrell, "has that to do with those unmerciful beatings? How about it?" "Did I not say that I was working indirectly?" countered d'Artois. "The scourgings, you understand, did not come until later, after the dreams had recurred for some time. Therefore they must be but an indication of the gradual increase----" "Of the undoubted insanity of all three of us!" interpolated Farrell. "Mademoiselle Antoinette," declared d'Artois, ignoring his friend's outburst, "is not dreaming. She actually spends her nights in that devil's paradise. She awakes and tells us that she had another body; but her _self_ retained its identity. I conclude then that her personality, her spiritual essence, whatever you will, is wandering, driven by some damnable compulsion to inhabit that garden, and a strange body." Farrell sighed wearily and shook his head. "This scrambling of selves and personalities is enough to drive one nutty. It doesn't make any sense." "Ah, say you so?" murmured d'Artois as he reached for another cigarette. "My logic is scrambled, in that I have not attempted to show _how_ this can be; but by assuming that it is, I get to the next point. "Listen somewhat further, yes? We have but to find that place which Antoinette's physical body, speaking like a Syrian dancing-girl, so graphically damned and called _junayn' ash-Shaytan_, Satan's garden. "There is such a garden at this moment in physical existence; or else there is one which, reaching out of the dimness of nine hundred departed years, is _en rapport_ with Antoinette." "Hell's fire!" muttered Farrell. "The ghost of a garden haunting a woman in Bayonne, in 1933!" D'Artois tapped the cover of _Siret al Haken_. "The author," he said, "tells of Hassan al Sabbah. _Shaykh al Djibal_, the Chief of the Mountains. The lord of the _Hashisheen_----"