time she had taken in so much as this the mellifluous young man had perceived and addressed himself to her brother. He came on with an offered hand. Nick greeted him and said it was a happy chance--he was uncommonly glad to see him. "I never come across you--I don't know why," Nick added while the two, smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after a long interval. "Oh it seems to me there's reason enough: our paths in life are so different." Nick's friend had a great deal of manner, as was evinced by his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her. "Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don't we both live in London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?" "Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don't live in the nineteenth century. _Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared. "Nor in London either?" "Yes--when I'm not at Samarcand! But surely we've diverged since the old days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his cues. "How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked. "I know well enough what you used to." "That's more than I do myself. There were so many things." "Yes, there are many things--many, many: that's what makes life so amusing." "Do you find it amusing?" "My dear fellow, _c'est a se tordre_. Don't you think so? Ah it was high time I should meet you--I see. I've an idea you need me." "Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as that, he didn't introduce him. "There are many gods and this is one of their temples," the mysterious personage went on. "It's a house of strange idols--isn't it?--and of some strange and unnatural sacrifices."