They caught the sound of faint flute music on an upper floor, and as Kirby felt cautiously for his footing on the lower step Warrington began to whistle softly to himself. Next to war, an adventure of this kind was the nearest he could imagine to sheer bliss, and it was all he could do to contrive to keep from singing. The heavy teak stairs creaked under their joint weight, and though their eyes could not penetrate the upper blackness, yet they both suspected rather than sensed some one waiting for them at the top. Kirby's right hand instinctively sought a pocket in his cloak. Warrington felt for his pistol, too. For thirty or more seconds--say, three steps--they went up like conspirators, trying to move silently and holding to the rail; then the absurdity of the situation appealed to both, and without a word said each stepped forward like a man, so that the staircase resounded. They stumbled on a little landing after twenty steps, and wasted about a minute knocking on what felt like the panels of a door; but then Warrington peered into the gloom higher up and saw dim light. So they essayed a second flight of stairs, in single file as before, and presently--when they had climbed some ten steps and had turned to negotiate ten more that ascended at an angle--a curtain moved a little, and the dim light changed to a sudden shaft that nearly blinded them. Then a heavy black curtain was drawn back on rings, and a hundred lights, reflected in a dozen mirrors, twinkled and flashed before them so that they could not tell which way to turn. Somewhere there was a glassbead curtain, but there were so many mirrors that they could not tell which was the curtain and which were its reflections. The curtains all parted, and from the midst of each there stepped a little nutbrown maid, who seemed too lovely to be Indian. Even then they could not tell which was maid and which reflections until she spoke. "Will the sahibs give their names?" she asked in Hindustani; and her voice suggested flutes. She smiled, and her teeth were whiter than a pipe-clayed sword-belt; there is nothing on earth whiter than her teeth were. "Colonel Kirby and Captain Warrington" said Kirby. "Will the sahibs state their business?" "No!" "Then whom do the sahibs seek to see?" "Does a lady live here named Yasmini?" "Surely, sahib." "I wish to talk with her." A dozen little maids seemed to step back through a dozen swaying curtains, and a second later for the life of them they could neither of them tell through which it was that the music came and the smell of musk and sandal-smoke. But she came back and beckoned to them, laughing over her shoulder and holding the middle curtain apart for them to follow. So, one after the other, they followed her, Kirby--as became a seriously-minded colonel on the eve of war--feeling out of place and foolish, but Warrington, possessed by such a feeling of curiosity as he had never before tasted.