Shortly after Durban resumed work, Beatrice received a surprise which rather pleased her. This was none other than an invitation to enter the counting-house. She had always desired to do so, being filled with that curiosity which led her grandmother Eve to eat apples, but hitherto Alpenny had declined to admit her. Now the door of the dungeon was open, and Alpenny, standing before it, beckoned that she should come in. In the bright sunshine he looked more decrepit and wicked than usual. He could not have been less than eighty years of age, and his spare figure was bowed with Time. That same Time had also robbed him of every hair on his head, and had even taken away eyebrows and eyelashes. As the old man was clean shaven, his gleaming head and hairless yellow wrinkled face looked rather repulsive. Nor did his dress tend to improve his appearance, for it was a shepherd's-plaid suit cut in the style of the early fifties, when he had been young, and presumably something of a dandy. In spite of the antiquity of the clothes, there was a suggestion of juvenility about them which matched badly with his Methuselah looks. Like an aged ghost he beckoned in the sunshine, and the white-painted erection behind him assumed, in the eyes of Beatrice, the look of a tomb. Wondering that she should be invited into Mammon's Shrine, the girl walked across the lawn. In her white dress, with her beautiful face shaded by a coarse straw hat, she appeared the embodiment of youth and grace, contrasting markedly with the senile old villain, who croaked out his orders. "Come in," said Alpenny testily, and with the screech of a peacock, as he pointed to the open door. "I wish to speak to you seriously."