If the approach to this holy of holies was commonplace, the shrine itself certainly was not. Prelice beheld a room of no great size furnished very oddly--that is to say, it was not furnished in the ordinary acceptation of the word. The ceiling was painted a dull red, and a plain carpet of the same hue was spread over the floor. Two windows looking on to Bond Street were filled in with painted glass, representing various mystical signs, and the four walls were hung with lustreless black stuff, which made the place look like a chapel during a funeral service. But the odd thing was that the red carpet was strewn with perfectly white cushions, and there was neither table nor chair. Tall pillars of black marble stood in the four corners, each bearing a glass ball on its summit, and between the windows was placed a bronze tripod, in which smoked a perfumed fire. What with the dim religious light, the black walls, the red carpet, and the snowy cushions of silk, Prelice felt somewhat dizzy. All this theatrical parade was evidently designed to produce a confusing effect, and unseat as much as possible the reason and judgment of Madame's dupes. Annoyed that he should give way so easily, the young man pulled his wits together, and looked at the priestess who had conceived this artful _mise en scène_. Madame Marie, clothed in a long white silk robe, made perfectly plain, knelt--Japanese fashion--on a cushion in front of the tripod, and with her back to the painted windows. She was a stout, heavy-looking woman, of apparently no great height, with a colourless face, very large and smooth, and with masses of snowy, silvery hair, which tumbled down her back in waves of white. What her figure might be Prelice could not judge because of the robe, but he noted that her hands were slender and beautiful, and also ringless. Indeed, she did not wear a single ornament of any description, and kneeling perfectly motionless, with closed eyes, looked like an idol carved out of alabaster. It was cleverly done, and Prelice, the sceptical, could quite understand how the majority of people yielded to the carefully prepared spells of this managing woman. But it was when Madame Marie opened her eyes that Prelice became aware of the true secret of her power over weaker minds. These were large and blue and clear, looking from under white eyebrows in a penetrating way, fathomless as the sea, and as mysterious. Prelice met this mystical gaze calmly, but felt his skin prickling, and his will power growing weak. Aware that the seeress was trying to hypnotise him, as she doubtless hypnotised her other clients, the young man concentrated his will to meet and baffle hers. For some time they stared at one another, Prelice looking down from his height, and Madame Marie gazing upward from her cushion. Then the woman closed her eyes again with a somewhat annoyed expression. "You are not a weak man," she said in a deep melodious voice, like the sound of a mellow bell.